Blue Centauri Consulting - Meta Tag Builder

Meta Tag Builder

Search engines use robot spiders to comb through the web and archive the websites they encounter for their engines. While this is an effective way of finding many websites, the robots don't always collect data to best describe the content of the sites they encounter. Meta tags were developed to better archive content. By using meta tags you can suggest how your website is displayed in different search engines as well as provide browers with information necessary to render the page as intended. This meta tag builder will help you customize your own tags.

Title:

The title of your webpage and how your webpage will be archived in many search engines which use robots to collect their information. This tag is recommended.

Keywords:

Sites that archive your website will use the keywords to classify the site and retrieve it in searches. The more keywords you have the more likely your site will be found. But be warned, some search engines penalize a site for having a word in the "keywords" field and not in the page itself. Also, word order matters, so put the most important words first, separated with a comma. This tag is recommended.

Description:

The description is displayed along side the title on search engines. If the description is not present, many robots grab the first few lines of text. This tag is recommended.

Author (Name):

In this field should go your name or the name of the person to give credit to for the website. This tag is recommended.

Expires:

This meta tag will tell the robots when the content becomes old and the browser should reload new information. This should be written in number of days, eg "+10." This tag is optional, but a good idea if you know your page will be updated frequently.

Charset:

The type of characters to use when displaying your webpage. Recommended if not ISO8859-1 (Western European 8-bit).

Language:

This tag is optional.

Dialect (country):

This tag is optional.

Robots:
INDEX
NOINDEX
FOLLOW
NOFOLLOW

This tag controls how the robots traverse the website. An option of "Index" means the robot is allowed to index the page for the search engine, "noindex" means that it is not. "Follow" means the robot is allowed to follow the links off of the particular page to other pages, while "nofollow" means that it is not. Generally this information can be stored in a robots.txt file for greater efficiency. Generally, it is assumed robots have index and follow privileges. This tag is optional.