Friday, December 01, 2006 - Most recent posts

HTML and Meta tags - do they help your website?

HTML and Meta tags - do they help your website?

HTML lang tag
The following can help to inform search engine robots on the language of your content, using the HTML tag like this:
html lang="en-GB"
This can help when indexing your website as per language (and may improve your country specific listing too).
You will find more on this here:
http://tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/international/web/tips/langtag.html
and http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/Overview.en.php

Meta tags
The robots tag - which some recommend using is the robots tag with the content attribute set to NOODP like this:
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"
I would suggest you DO NOT use this as it tells the robot NOT to use any of the Open Directory Project descriptions. Think about this logically, the ODP is a human edited directory and is still one of the most trusted sites for website descriptions in the World, and you are telling the robot to not use it. If you were that robot collecting that data you wouldn't then trust that website, and maybe decide to exclude it or flag it for manual checking, either way the outcome is not good. Read more on the GoD (Google official documentation): Google on meta & robots

Do use the the tags:
META "description" CONTENT="Where/why you should host your website..."
META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="UK web hosting, location country, google listings, etc"

But do not over use these and do not expect them to provide you with a massive boost.

So correct HTML can help, as can meta tags but they can also hinder your website, so add them with care. And remember to ensure your website is listed within Google's country-specific saerch results you must host in your native country (or at least be using a country specific domain name, e.g. website.co.uk).

Happy webmastering everyone

Dave.

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