.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
NOTE: This is a collection of information and links collected over the years that might provide useful information. A Safer Company LLC does not guarantee, endorse or approve any of these links or their scripts. Use these links to other websites at your own risk.
Meta Tags
How do you get your website and your business found by potential customers or clients?
Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users find businesses. Your business website has the same chance to be found through a search engine as a larger company. A business with a good search engine ranking of their website can see a dramatic increase in business. Search engines optimization is an effective and inexpensive way to advertise your business.
A Safer Company is constantly evaluating what search engines use to evaluate web pages. Even though there is no way to guarantee that your website will always be listed first, there are ways to help your search ranking. Please remember that major search engines may take up from 4 to 6 weeks to categorize your site and add it to their database.
Title Tag for Search Engines
The title tag is the most important SEO tag for any website. Make your title descriptive of the page and include the most critical key words. Make the title unique to every page. The title should to limited to 40-60 characters.
<title>Business Name - keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword4 keyword5 keyword6</title>
Keywords
Keywords are words used in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Words you use on your website must be the same words that visitors use to search the world wide web. The worst scenario is that the search words are not on your website therefore your website will not be found. You must make sure that the words that people are using to search for your product or service are on your web pages.
Review your website to make sure it can be indexed by search engines. Look for items that may prevent your website from being indexed:
- duplicate content
- flash content
- dynamic content
Meta Tags
Placement of META tags
META tags should always be placed between the <head> </head> tags.
Make sure your site has meta tags.Meta tags are used for search engines to catalog and rank your web page. Search engines rate your website by relevancy to the user's searches. The more words that you have that match what the user is looking for, the more of a chance that you will be visited by them.
Meta tags are located in the header section of your website's html source between the <head> </head> tags. . This is an example of meta tags to help increase your website's search engine raking.
<html>
<head>
<META name="description" content="A Safer Company can provide you a website for personal or business uses.">
<META name="keywords" content="A Safer Company, website, nc, North Carolina, web design, web consulting ">
<META name="robots" content="all">
<title>A Safer Company - Helping you promote your website</title>
</head>
<body> .... </body>
</html>
Meta Tags - Key Words
<META name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4, keyword 5, keyword 6, keyword 7, keyword 8, keyword 9, keyword 10, keyword 11, keyword 12">
The Meta keyword attribute is used to tell the search engines which keywords to use. Some articles say that it is useless with SEO but it is still good to use them as reminder of the targeted keywords. The keywords should be the words or phrases your customers might use to find your website. Keywords can be repeated up to six times but they must not be right next to each other. Some Search Engines may still rate your website based on the relevancy of the user's query. The more words that you have that match what the user is looking for, the more of a chance that you will be visited by them. The maximum limit of characters in your meta keywords tag is 250 characters including spaces.
Make sure you use these key words in the title and in the text. Put the key words in bold, italics, bullets or header tags.
Meta Tag Description
<META name="description" content="this will be a brief description of your company and why someone should go to your website. This is the description that many search engines display.">
The META description attribute is the description for the web page. It is simply verbiage that search engines may also take into consideration when researching your site to include into their lists. These words should make the end-user want to visit your site. You are limited to around 25 words or 200 - 250 characters. You can even repeat the keywords in your description a couple of times.
Expires
The date and time when the web page will be considered expired. Netscape Navigator, a request for a document whose time has "expired" will initiate a new network request for the document. An illegal Expires date such as "0" is interpreted by the browser as "immediately." Dates must be in the RFC850 format, (GMT format):
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 26 Feb 2010 08:21:57 GMT">
Pragma
Used to control browser caching. The value must be "no-cache" to prevents Netscape Navigator from caching a web page.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
These two tags can be used as together to keep your content current. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer may refuse the META tag instructions and caches the files anyway.
Redirect a Page
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.the-domain-you-want-to-redirect-to.com">
- 0 - tells the browser the number of seconds to wait before redirecting to the new url. You could set this to 15 and add some text to your page to let the visitor know that the page has been redirected. For example:
"Please wait while we redirect you to our new site".
Refresh
Specifies the time in seconds before the web browser reloads the document automatically. It can specify a different URL for the browser to load. Place quotation marks around the entire CONTENT attribute’s value, or the page will not reload at all.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.newurl.com">
Set-Cookie
One method of setting a "cookie" in the user’s browser. If you use an expiration date, the cookie is considered permanent and will be saved to disk (until it expires), otherwise it will be considered valid only for the current session and will be erased upon closing the Web browser.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Set-Cookie" CONTENT="cookievalue=xxx;expires=Wednesday, 21-Oct-98 16:14:21 GMT; path=/">
Window-target
Specifies the "named window" of the current page, and can be used to prevent a page from appearing inside another framed page. Usually this means that the Web browser will force the page to go the top frameset.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Window-target" CONTENT="_top">
Meta Tags for Robots
Some search engines use Robots to scans your website for relevant information including what is in your meta tags, your body content etc. A Robot will only review the pages that you have added this tag:
<META name="robots" content="all">
If you who do not wish your pages to be indexed by the spiders and do not have access to the robots.txt file, then use the robots META attribute.
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="all | none | index | noindex | follow | nofollow">
- all - the default for the robot attribute and allows all of the files to be indexed.
- None - the spider not to index any files, and not to follow the hyperlinks on the page to other pages.
- Index - this page may be indexed by the spider
- follow - the spider is free to follow the links from this page to other pages.
- noindex - the spider should not follow the links from this page and do not index this page
- nofollow - would allow the page itself to be indexed, but the links could not be followed.
W3C’s robot paper for more information about the robot attribute.
Page last updated: May 31, 2012 14:28 PM
Content and Navigation...