50+ Common Meta Tags
Many Meta tags are not used by all the search engines
META TAGS description, classification and keywords minimum. (Be sure to add Meta tags for keywords, description, and classification). If you can improve on the words provided by the client do so. Use key word phrases of location and activity together, or different variations of gear. Think what the user would do to find a site. What combination of key words would they put in the search engines.
MORE THAN JUST A FEW
Use These Tags and Get Your
Website Noticed
For those who may be curious, here is a list of META tags.
Tag Name |
Description |
| Name | Description |
| Author | The name of the page's author. |
| Generator | The program used to generate this document. It is often the name of the HTML editor used. |
| Keywords | Provides keywords for search engines such as Infoseek or Alta Vista. These are added to the keywords found in the document itself. |
| Title | The title of the document. |
| Expires | This tells the browser the date and time when the document will be considered "expired." If a user is using Netscape Navigator, a request for a document whose time has "expired" will initiate a new network request for the document. An illegal Expires date such as "0" is interpreted by the browser as "immediately." Dates must be in the RFC850 format, (GMT format) |
| Description | Search engines which support the above tag will now display the text you specify here, rather than the first few lines of text from the actual document when the document shows up in a search result. You have about 1,000 characters for your description, but not all these will be used. |
| Pragma | This is another way to control browser caching. To use this tag, the value must be "no-cache". When this is included in a document, it prevents the browser from caching a page locally. |
| Refresh | This tag specifies the time in seconds before the Web browser reloads the document automatically. Alternatively, it can specify a different URL for the browser to load. |
| Set Cookie | This is one method of setting a "cookie" in the user's Web browser. If you use an expiration date, the cookie is considered permanent and will be saved to disk (until it expires), otherwise it will be considered valid only for the current session and will be erased upon closing the Web browser. |
| Window Target | This one specifies the "named window" of the current page, and can be used to prevent a page from appearing inside another framed page. Usually this means that the Web browser will force the page to go the top frameset. |
| Robots | Tells visiting spiders how to index the current page. The default for the robot attribute is "all". This would allow all of the files to be indexed. "None" would tell the spider not to index any files, and not to follow the hyperlinks on the page to other pages. "Index" indicates that this page may be indexed by the spider, while "follow" would mean that the spider is free to follow the links from this page to other pages. |
| Revisit | Use to inform a visiting spider when it should return to re-index the page. |
| PICS Rating | The minimum age in years that a person should be to view the contents of the page. |
| Reply to | The email address of the contact person for the document. |
| Copyright | Provides a copyright notice for the page. |
| Language | The language of the intellectual content of the resource. Where practical, the content of this field should coincide with RFC 1766 [Tags for the Identification of Languages, http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1766.txt ]; examples include en, de, es, fi, fr, ja, th, and zh. |
| dc.title | The name given to the resource, usually by the Creator or Publisher. |
| dc.alttitle | The name given to the resource, usually by the Creator or Publisher. |
| dc.creator | The person or organization primarily responsible for creating the intellectual content of the resource. |
| dc.keywords | The topic of the resource. Typically, subject will be expressed as keywords or phrases that describe the subject or content of the resource. |
| dc.subject | The topic of the resource. Typically, subject will be expressed as keywords or phrases that describe the subject or content of the resource. |
| dc.description | A textual description of the content of the resource, including abstracts in the case of document-like objects or content descriptions in the case of visual resources. |
| dc.publisher | The entity responsible for making the resource available in its present form, such as a publishing house, a university department, or a corporate entity. |
| dc.publisherAddress | The address of the document's publisher. |
| dc.date: | A date associated with the creation or availability of the resource. Such a date is not to be confused with one belonging in the Coverage element, which would be associated with the resource only insofar as the intellectual content is somehow about that date. Recommended best practice is defined in a profile of ISO 8601 [Date and Time Formats (based on ISO8601), W3C Technical Note, http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime] that includes (among others) dates of the forms YYYY and YYYY-MM-DD. In this scheme, for example, the date 1994-11-05 corresponds to November 5, 1994 |
| dc.type | The category of the resource, such as home page, novel, poem, working paper, technical report, essay, dictionary. |
| dc.format | The data format of the resource, used to identify the software and possibly hardware that might be needed to display or operate the resource. |
| dc.indentifier | A string or number used to uniquely identify the resource. Examples for networked resources include URLs and URNs (when implemented). Other globally-unique identifiers, such as International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) or other formal names are also candidates for this element. |
| dc.source | Information about a second resource from which the present resource is derived. While it is generally recommended that elements contain information about the present resource only, this element may contain a date, creator, format, identifier, or other metadata for the second resource when it is considered important for discovery of the present resource; recommended best practice is to use the Relation element instead. |
| dc.language | The language of the intellectual content of the resource. Where practical, the content of this field should coincide with RFC 1766 [Tags for the Identification of Languages, http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1766.txt ]; examples include en, de, es, fi, fr, ja, th, and zh. |
| dc.relation | An identifier of a second resource and its relationship to the present resource. This element permits links between related resources and resource descriptions to be indicated. Examples include an edition of a work (IsVersionOf), a translation of a work (IsBasedOn), a chapter of a book (IsPartOf), and a mechanical transformation of a dataset into an image (IsFormatOf). |
| dc.lastmodified | Date the information was input or last modified. Dates are expressed as YYYY/MM/DD. |
| dc.rights | A rights management statement, an identifier that links to a rights management statement, or an identifier that links to a service providing information about rights management for the resource. |
| originator | The originator identifies the governmental authority responsible for the information. This field will be used to consistently identify information generated by that originator. Searchers should be able to consistently retrieve potentially relevant items by searching under the name of the originator. State agency participants should use designations consistent with the SCAN directory. |
| originatorJurisdiction | The originator jurisdiction |
| originatorDepartment | The originator department |
| originatorDivision | The originator division |
| originatorSection | The originator section. |
| originatorOffice | The originator office. |
| createDate | Date information resource was created. Dates are expressed as YYYY/MM/DD. |
| dateofLastModification | Date the information was input or last modified. Dates are expressed as YYYY/MM/DD. |
| timePeriodTextual | Briefly description of the time period covered by the content of the resource being described. |
| medium | The text description of the physical file or formats in which the resource is available |
| govType | A text field: select a category which most closely matches the originating body or the audience for the information subjects |
| contactName | Name of person or unit who is responsible for information |
| contactOrganization | Contact person's organization. |
| contactStreetAddress1 | Contact person's address. |
| contactStreetAddress2 | Contact person's address. |
| contactCity | Contact person's city. |
| contactState | Contact person's state or province. |
| contactZipcode | Contact person's zip code. |
| contactPhoneNumber | Contact person's phone number. |
| contactFaxNumber | Contact person's fax number. |
| contactNetworkAddress | Contact person's email address. |
| originalControlIdentifier | Unique control number assigned by the originating agency. |
| accessConstraints | Statement describing the access allowed by a citizen |
| agencyProgram | Identifies the official name for an agency program or mission supported by the information. May correspond to the program budget name within the unit of government. |
| linkage | Use this tag if you wish to provide a URL which references another source for information on the same topic. |
| note | Space to add any supplemental information that may be helpful to the searcher. |
