META TAGS

Meta tags, <META>, are used in your files for various reasons or to do certain things. Use these topics below to learn how to use meta tags on your main page.

Also see Information on Search Engines.

Inserting Meta Tags To Describe Your Site To Search Engines

Meta tags that describe your site to search engines only are put in your main page, i.e. the entrance page to your site.

There are two meta tags for describing your site to search engines:

  1. INSERTING META TAGS IN PAGE PROPERTIES - Can be used to add any meta tags to your site. The basics ones are: (a) description and keywords.

    These tags must be placed in the HEAD SCRIPT of the Advanced Page Properties. To insert these tags in your Page Builder file you must:

    • Click on the ADVANCED PAGE PROPERTIES.
    • Insert any of the META CODES (listed below) in the box labeled HEAD SCRIPT. Although the HEAD SCRIPT BOX is small you can actually put all the meta tags you wish in there.

    META TAGS
    Five (5) Minimum Tags You should use:

    <meta http-equiv="title" content="YOUR TITLE HERE">
    <meta name="web author" content="NAME, LOCATION, ETC">
    <meta name="description" Content="GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PAGE">
    <meta name="keywords" Content="VARIOUS KEYWORDS SEPARATED BY COMMAS">
    <meta name="copyright" content="YEARS">

    Other Tags You Can Use:


    <meta name="robots" content="all">
    <meta name="distribution" content="all">
    <meta name="rating" content="general">
    <meta name="resource-type" content="document">
    <meta name="revisit-after" content=30 days">
    <meta name="classification" content="consumer">
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="SECONDS, URL">

    You can copy (highlight the tag and then CTRL+C) and paste (place cursor in the HEAD box and CTRL+V) any of the meta tags above from this help page to the HEAD SCRIPT BOX in the ADVANCED PAGE PROPERTIES in Page Builder (see graphic above).

    Replace the RED WORDS with words that represent your page. The VARIOUS KEYWORDS are one or two words separated by a comma, e.g.

    <meta name="keywords" Content="golf, golf instructions, tips, courses">.

    You can add as many keywords as you like but do not repeat the same keyword and limit the number of keywords to those that you feel describe your site content.

    If you don't want to make your own meta tags, then go to BRAVENET'S META TAG GENERATOR to have them made for you. Then you just copy & paste the code in your file in the HEAD SCRIPT box shown above.

    You can also get some good tips and tutorials about search engines at Bravenet's Search Engine Tips

    NOTE: See below for how to use the refresh meta tag, which can automatically re-direct a visitor to another URL.

  2. KEYWORDS - these can be added by using the Page Properties. This method is OK but you can only add keywords and not the description of your page.

If you don't want search engines to catalog your pages then use this code:

<meta name="robots" Content="noindex, nofollow">

Bare Minimum Meta Tags
The bare minimum meta tags should be:

<META name="description" content="A page devoted to the game of golf">
<META name="keywords" content="golf, swing analysis, rules, technology">

The two tags you use on your pages are:

   <META name="description" content="short description of your page">

which tells a search engine how you describe your page. Generally, this is a sentence but need not be. It can be up to 200 characters long.

   <META name="keywords" content="various keywords about your page">

which tells the search engine what keywords are in your page so they can be matched with the search keywords. You can have up to 1,000 characters for keywords.

You can copy & paste these two tags directly into your page's Advance Page Properties HEAD SCRIPT. Then change the short description of your page and various keywords about your page to suit you page, e.g.

<META name="keywords" content="A page about baseball during the 1950's">
<META name="keywords" content="baseball, 1950, highlights, teams">

You can also add a special META tag to your files so that GeoCities can categorize your page within GeoCities. The special tag will look something like this:

<META NAME="mytopic" CONTENT="Avenue:Subavenue:Topic">

To keep Search Engines Robots from 'grabbing' your page, use the following:

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

Submit Your Site To Search Engines
Once you have the meta tags in your file your can submit your site to:

NOTE: Submitting your site to search engines most likely will not allow others to find your site due the millions of pages already on the web.

Automatically Re-direct Visitor To Another Page
Many times an author will have a page on the web that many people may have a book mark to. If the author moves the page to a new server or simply wishes to redirect the surfer to a new page, the META tag is the best way to do this.

The tag to use for this is:

<META HTTP-EQUIV=REFRESH CONTENT="S, URL">

where:

  • S = number of seconds to delay before transferring surfer to URL, e.g. 0, 1, 2, 10, etc.
  • URL = the web site to transfer to, e.g. http://www.netscape.com

You add this code in the ADVANCED PAGE PROPERTIES > HEAD SCRIPT box

NOTE: It is illegal in GeoCities to automatically forward a surfer to a page OUTSIDE of GeoCities by using this META tag in your index.html file.