Girl Geekette

Q. Why do people build websites?
A. They have something to share.

Plain and simple: Whether you are a business who has something to sell, a website designer, or even the average Joe, the game is still the same - to get listed high in the search engines. The better your listing is, the more people that will come to your website. For the vast majority of website owners, the reason the website is there in the first place is because they want others to read what they have to say.

At one point, meta tags were of the utmost importance to search engines. They became an essential part in ranking. That is - until meta tag abuse because widely used as false tactics for listings.

Currently, there are 2 meta tags that are very important when it comes to search engines. The keywords and the description meta tags are the essential ones to use.

When building a website, the hard part is knowing how to target your site for the keywords - for the keywords are what search engines will relate each page to. You want to place about 20 keywords at the most in each page in the meta tags. Also, you want to reuse the same keywords in your page itself in the text. If you use the same keywords in your description (The brief summary that will show up for that page in the search engine) and title, the keyword density (the number of times you use that keyword on the page) will become heavier and give that page a chance to be higher ranked.

Besides the keyword and description meta tags being the most important ones, there are some meta tags that are proprietary to Google’s own Googlebot. According to Google, the  tags that would apply specifically to Google’s Googlebot are the ones that have name="googlebot" in the meta tag.

There are many reasons not to have a Search Engine cache a page. If it is copyrighted, if it contains private information that you do not want displayed from a search engine, or for any other reason you do not want the page crawled by a search engine, you can add the following code to the meta tags of a page and it will keep the page from being indexed:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

If you would like specifically to keep Google  from indexing the page, but allow other Search Engines to index it, you can place the following meta tags in your headers of the page: