We have a lot of calls asking about Meta Tags and how to use them. For those of you who don't know what a Meta Tag is, it is an HTML tag that contains information about your site, page, author, etc., that doesn't actually show up on your page visually.

To add Meta Tags to a page, go to the Page Menu and choose Page Properties, then click on the Page Meta Tags tab. This enables you to add meta tags that are specific to each page of your site.

The first tag is the "Title" tag. The title is shown at the top of the browser. Search engines often display the title so it is the first thing searchers read when looking at search results. It is also what shows up in someone's Favorites or Bookmarks when they add your page. So, make it something that describes the content or function of the page. Don't use titles like "Home". Use the name of your company as the Title as your home page.

For other pages, use the company name and the name you gave the page. For example, "Web Studio - About Us".

Next is the "Description" Tag. This is the text people will see below in your listing on a search engine. If you leave this blank, the search engine may use any random text from your page.

For great insights into writing a description see the Search Engine article "How To Create Effective Page Descriptions."

Next is the "Keywords" Meta tab. This is where most people spend their energy. These are the words you think people will search for to find sites like yours. For example, we use "web design software" as a set of keywords. In fact, they are our best keywords, more people come to our site after searching for web design software than any others. You can enter individual words as well as phrases into the Keywords tag.

Make sure you read the "A Tool to Acquire Keywords" article as well as the "Don't add Keywords to your pages" article and the "Repetition of Keywords in Page Titles could be Bad" article for help developing your keyword strategies.

Finally, we have the "User's Meta Tag" section. This is where you can add Meta Tags of your own. There are many types of tags that are used by search engines. The rest of the article shows you to add Meta Tags using the correct format. You'll be actually adding "raw" HTML into this section of the dialog. One word of caution, make sure you follow the directions exactly; don't make any typos; enter all of the strange chracters as they are shown; and don't forget any or it could mess up your page.

You should Preview the page after entering your own Meta Tags. If you see weird text on the page, it is probably because you made a mistake entering the tag.

Now you'll enter the actual content of the Meta Tag. Here is a sample Meta Tag for keywords:

‹META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="web studio web page editor"›

Make up a couple of keywords you want to use and type the following into the Properties dialog:

‹META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="

Then, on the same line, beside the quote, type all of your keywords followed by:

"›

‹META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="news letter"›

If your keywords were "news" and "letter" it would look like this:

‹META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="news letter"›

You won't have to actually add the "Keyword" tag since the dialog will do that for you automatically when you enter keywords into the Key Words section of the dialog. You'll add Meta tags that Web Studio doesn't automatically provide. We've provided a list of frequently used Meta tags at the end of this article.

You'll want to add Meta tags to each page in your site. Use the same procedure described in the article: go to the page; go to Page Properties; go to Page Meta Tags, etc.

Make sure you use appropriate keywords for each of those pages. Many of them will be the same, but you'll want keywords that are unique and applicable to each page as well.

Remember, the reason you'll want to do this is to have different keywords on each page in your site.

Here are a few User Meta Tags you can add to your pages.


‹META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Tue, 30 Aug 2006 13:24:30 GMT""›
This tag indicates that the document expires on the indicated date. This is useful for HTML files that frequently change, as this tag instructs the web browser to load a new copy of the file from the server, instead of using the copy in the browser's cache. Note that you must indicate the date in the above format for this tag to function properly.

‹meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow""›
This tells the spider not to index this page and not to follow any links from this page. Unfortunately, not all spiders are polite and do not necessarily adhere to the instructions in this meta tag.

‹meta name="revisit-after" content="15 days""›
Notice to web robots indexing the page when to revisit next.

‹meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, ALL""›
Notice to web robots what pages to index.

‹meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, FOLLOW""›
Notice to web robots what action to take on the page, in this case follow all links.

The next article in this series is Don't Add Keywords to Your Web Pages