The Front Page Wizard

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Important Note: Meta tag code should be on one continuous line and not break or wrap. Due to the text constrictions of our page our example's may do this; Just remember that when your viewing your code in the html view that they should not break in your html code.

When you submit your site to a Search Engine, it sends a little program called a spider to visit your site and gather information about your site. The spider will take certain bits of information from your coding to determine what each page is about, and where and how it should be displayed to a person using the Search Engine. Most Search Engines will use your Meta Tag defined keywords and description to perform this task.

It is important to make sure that the keywords you use are relevant to your page. It is also VERY BAD to repeat any keyword more than 3 or 4 times. Search Engines will view this as an attempt to SPAM your keywords and some will drop your page altogether from the Search Engine listings.

Types of Tags

A user-defined or system META variable will allow you to add information to the HTTP header for a page (the information about a page that is not visible to the site visitor; i.e.: source code)

The NAME or HTTP-EQUIV attribute declares a variable for the page and the CONTENT attribute assigns a value to the variable. A META tag supplies information about the page, but does not affect its appearance.

System META variable

Meta tags that use the HTTP-EQUIV attribute as the name portion of their name-value pairs supply special instructions to a Web browser, such as an expiration date or a display-refresh (redirect) value.

Example: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://frontpagewizard.com/">

User-defined META variable

Meta tags with a NAME attribute, which do not correspond to HTTP headers, are used to reflect property associated with the page.

Example: <meta name="keywords" content="frontpage, tips, tricks,">


Example Set of Meta Tags

Here's a example set of tags, of course you will need to replace the words in red with your own information. Remember to paste this in to a blank notepad text file and save it first prior to copying it into your source code.

This goes in the < Head > section of your code.

<title>The name of your site</title>
<meta name="description" content="What is this page about">
<meta name="keywords" content="What, words, describe, this, page,">
<meta name="author" content="your name">

<meta name="language" content="en-usa">

<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">

<meta name="owner" content="your name">

<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright© 1996 - 2003 your name, All rights reserved">

<meta name="contact_addr" content="email@address.com">

<meta name="rating" content="general">

<meta name="robots" content="all">

<meta name="distribution" content="global">

<meta name="classification" content="your category">

<meta http-equiv="reply-to" content="email@address.com">

More Meta Tag Tips

If you wish to indicate to a search engines spider that you don’t want a certain page indexed, insert the following Meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

When you mouse over an image in IE6, a menu pops up with options such as Save, Print & Email Image. To disable this, include the following meta tag:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar"CONTENT="no">

Robots.txt and FrontPage

Note: Not all search engines or their spiders will notice or use the meta tag and not all spiders will take notice of the robots.txt file.

You can also include a robots.txt file on your site that will tell search engine spiders to ignore folders and to spider the site. You can find out more about this at: Robotstxt.org

If you don’t want your page showing up in the FrontPage Table of Contents component or Search Page insert an underscore in front of the file name:

Example:   _pagename.htm to prevent this happening.

If you want to prevent a page being saved in your visitor's cache you can do so by inserting the following three tags:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="0">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Control" CONTENT=">

It’s also a good idea to get your site labelled at ICRA:

 META HTTP-EQUIV="pics-label" CONTENT=

Content Labels generated by ICRA conform to an Internet industry standard known as PICS - the Platform for Internet Content Selection.

You can learn more about this here: http://www.icra.org/about/