I have a question about meta tags. I recently purchased an old site that has not been updated in over 10 years. I am going to add new pages, and am not sure if I should keep everything consistant and use the same meta tags with different keywords, or should I use more up to date ones. The old meta tags only include the following: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="description" "> <meta name="keywords" content=""> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0"> <title></title> Newer ones I have seen include items like: <TITLE></TITLE> <META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT=" "> <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="."> <META NAME="Abstract" CONTENT="."> <BASE HREF=""> <META NAME="Contact" CONTENT=" <META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="ALL"> <META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW"> <META NAME="Revisit-After" CONTENT="30 Days"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="en"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> Am I better off with this extra stuff, or am I better off being consistant. Thanks for the advice, Scott
The first one on your first list should remain Second and third should be self explanatory (I'm assuming you accidently cut out the content part of the description) Fourth, generator, should be removed so people don't laugh Out of the newer ones they should all be lowercase. I'll assume you know what title means. Keywords and description are the same. Abstract is virtually useless, since Google, Yahoo, etc. ignore it. Base is for setting the "starting point" for relative file paths on the page. Contact is not really necessary (a site should have it's own contact page in most cases). The first robots "all" means robots should index the page and follow links on the page. The second one means it should only index the current page and not follow the links. Revisit-After is useless as robots index your site based on popularity and freshness of content (not when YOU tell them to). In the US, the HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" content should be "en-us" since there are different dialects. The final one you can ignore since your character set is likely to be different.
Thanks very much for the advice. I have changed the tags, and they now appear as follows. Does this appear correct? <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <TITLE>Nail Fungus</TITLE> <META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="nail fungus, toenail fungus, nail fungus treatment, home remedies for nail fungus, nail fungus cure "> <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Nail fungus information. Extensive information about the causes and symptoms of fingernail and toenail fungus. Learn about prevention and nail fungus treatment."> <META NAME="Abstract" CONTENT="Information about nail fungus treatment and prevention."> <BASE HREF="http://www.XXXXXX.org"> <META NAME="Contact" CONTENT="admin@XXXXXX.org"> <META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="ALL"> <META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW"> <META NAME="Revisit-After" CONTENT="30 Days"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="en-us"> </head> Since I have links on this page to other pages, I changed the second robots instructions to follow. The only thing I did not do was change to lower case. Is that important? How does it look now ? I really appreciate your help. Scott
No problem, Scott The reason I suggested lowercase is because you have to use lowercase for XHTML (but not HTML like you are using), so it's a much easier transition if you start using lowercase early. For the description, I'd suggest removing the first three-word sentence, since it is basically repeated in more detail in the second sentence. (It's not wrong, but bots that rely on descriptions often only take a very limited number of characters from it). You can leave the abstract, but I'd personally remove it because it takes up a little bit of space without significant value. Google, Yahoo, etc. ignore it. The few places I still see it used (though still rarely) are with research papers. You don't NEED the base tag. Here's a quick example: Say your page has a link to "yellowfunk.html" and the page is at "http://www.yayfungus.com/greenstuff.html" the browser will look for that file at "http://www.yayfungus.com/yellowfunk.html" automatically. If you specify a base of "http://www.yayfungus.com" it will not accomplish anything. The difference is when you specify the base as somewhere that the file is not (so if greenstuff.html is in the root and the link goes to yellowfunk.html but the base is set to "http://www.yayfungus.com/funcolors/" then the browser would look for the file in "funcolors" instead). See this thread for more info. Again, contact is up to you as to whether you want to include it or not. Most sites have a contact page for that purpose (since very few agents will make use of the contact info from a meta tag). You don't need both robots lines. They both equate to the exact same thing. "All" is shorthand for "Index,Follow" Revisit-After can be deleted. Hope that helps.