META tag dilemma

I have a project going on as you can see in my sig. and right now I'm not using any META tag. I would like your advice as to what I should use. Some places I have read say that more than one META tag is interpreted as spam by some of the SEs but I could also see the usefulness of multiple tags for different info ie:

<meta name="description" content="description in English">
<meta name="keywords" lang="es" content="keywords in Spanish">
<meta name="keywords" lang="en" content="keywords in English">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">

Would this be considered spam?
What meta tag(s) would you recommend for my site?

 

I do not believe any of that is spam.

I would recommend Description definitely, and also Keywords for some older applications.

Content-Type is always good.

Why are you disabling caching? Is your bandwidth free?

 

If you have different language pages than tahm make max use of them.
You can have either a title with both languges in it or use language specific pages.

Some years back I did translations and still do the odd ones and have a site out there that shows what G makes out of such title meta combos and the content

chequertree translations chequertree uebersetzungen

brings up different combinations of pages.
You can also language code meta if and when you have multiple languages.

If you have them it's never spam.
M

 

I manage a English-French site. I have 1 splash page and 2 home pages, 1 for each version. I optimized each page for keywords in it's language. My meta tags are 1 only 1 language, except for the splash page. My splash page meta description is in English followed by French.

I use this "alternate language" meta tag in all my pages to point the the equivalent page in the other language:
In English pages
<LINK REL="alternate" HREF="page_f.html" HREFLANG="fr" TITLE="French page title">
In French pages:
<LINK REL="alternate" HREF="page_e.html" HREFLANG="en" TITLE="English page title">

 

Will, I don't necessarrily want to disable cache, the tags I posted are just some examples of what I have seen in source code on different pages. To be honest I really don't know what I need or should have for meta tags on my pages.

Based on your comments here is what I'm looking at:

On the first page I should put meta desc and keywords in both English and Spanish, in addition to the charset info. On this page, I detect what lang to show using the browser accept lang, so it can show up in either lang but regardless of this, should I put the meta desc and keywords in both languages?

On the rest of the site, I will put only a description and keywords (and charset) on each page, but only in the appropriate language.

This is what I'm looking at:

Root document: (to be served with the Spanish and English content)
<meta name="description" lang="es" content="description in Spanish">
<meta name="description" lang="en" content="description in English">
<meta name="keywords" lang="es" content="keywords in Spanish">
<meta name="keywords" lang="en" content="keywords in English">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

All documents in Spanish
<meta name="description" lang="es" content="description in Spanish">
<meta name="keywords" lang="es" content="keywords in Spanish">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

All documents in English
<meta name="description" lang="en" content="description in English">
<meta name="keywords" lang="en" content="keywords in English">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Does this sound like a reasonable plan? Do you have any other suggestions?

 

Just one last question on meta tags. Do any of you think that it would be counterproductive/bad SEO to have "duplicate" desc and keyword tags, one in English and one in Spanish? The reason I would put them like this on the same page, is because the content is presented in either of the two languages based on the browser language. Thanks for your input.

 

A meta tag is a tag in the html that describe some aspect of the contents of a web page. the information you provide in a meta tag is used by search engine to index a page so that someone searching for kind of information that page contains will be able to find it....