Girl Geekette dotNet

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.

Generally, with template websites, it is not easy to find 20 keywords that will be used on every page and have the same keywords repeat on every page to be relative in the articles. The best practice is to target the keywords on each page and have them change on every page.

For example: If your website is titled "Joe’s Camp Adventure", you might have 15 pages - one for each day. With most template websites, the same title would be on each page. The same description and keywords would be used on each page as well. If the description of the website is "The Adventures Joe Had While Camping in the Summer of 1999", and the keywords for the website are "camp camping, campfire, snake, rainy, bass, water, July, 1999, hiking, bear, fox" these keywords and the same title would repeat on every page.

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:

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

On the other hand, if you would like the robots to index the file, but not follow the links on the page, you can use this code.

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