This is for the Head Tag

<title>Head Tags and Their Uses- with examples</title>

• Your title is what is going to be shown in the search engines.
• Make it as descriptive and specific as possible.
• You are usually allowed up to 84 characters for this purpose.
• Anything above this is normally cut off and not displayed.

<meta name="author" content="Joseph Raymond (nuB1)">

• As it implies, a place to leave your name. I use my screen nick - nuB1 - as part of my name. This will be picked up by search engines. If I enter nuB1 in a search field and hit enter; all of my pages they have indexed will appear.

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

• Normally when you submit a page to a search index they will have their spider (robot) program search out your site to one degree or another. Sometimes you may not wish to have a page to be indexed. Sometimes you may not want the links on a page to be followed. We all have diffenrent reasons for doing this. This meta tag may be read by the spider program and therefore may give the results you want. Not always a sure thing yet gives partial control back to you.
• here are the possibilities and what they do:
  • index - This will tell the spider to include this page in its search data base.
  • noindex - This will tell the spider to exclude this page from its search data base.
  • follow - This will tell the spider to follow all the links found on your page. Whether in your site or not.
  • nofollow - This will tell the spider not to follow any of the links found on your page.
• You can use one or two from the above list. You cannot use either of the opposite pairs.
  • Ex: such as index, noindex     This will just confuse the spider.

<meta name="keywords" content="meta, author, robots, such and stuff, keywords, generator, description, meta, title">

• This meta tag is used to give what are the key words on your page. This will help the search engine pin point material asked by a search querry. You may have noticed "such and stuff" in the keyword field. You can use logical multi words if they help describe the content. An example of it can be "gasoline pump". When someone does a search asking for a gasoline pump your page will have a greater chance of being displayed.
• You can submit hundreds of words in this meta tag. Be careful not to submit many repeats of the same word over and over. Some search engines penalize the site that does.
• It is possible that not all of your words are going to be indexed. Some search engines limit the number of words. Be sure to place the most important words at the start of the contents listing in case it is limited
• Some sites allow up to 1000 characters in the content field.

<meta name="generator" content="notepad">

• Generator is the name of the editor you are using to create a page. This is used by some search indexes and other linking computers. I really don't know how important it is to include this, but I do anyways.
• Examples: homepager, lotus, netscape, frontpage, etc with their version number if possible. In my case I generally use the simple note pad program that comes with Windows.
• This information is generally included automatically by the program you are using.

<meta name="description" content="This page shows examples of what can appear in the head of the document.">

• The description meta tag is similar to the title tag with this big difference - You usually are allowed up to 400+ characters to describe what your page is about. This sometimes appears under the title information in the search engine. Make sure the most important points are written first. Sometimes, if the description is long, it is cut short from displaying the whole content.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

• This is an important meta tag to include in your page. It is automatically placed within your head by the editor you are using to create the page. It tells others what character set was used in the creation of the page. With this examle it is the western character set. There are other sets which use different values for display.

<script language="javascript"><!--
function theJSx()
{
     alert("The script is in the head of the document and the call is in the paragraph")
}
// --></script>

• This is the way that you would add javascript into the head of your document.
• It can also be added in the same manner inside the body - depends on when you want it to load.
• For good form I normally include type="text/javascript" as well as the language="javascript".

  • Example of the javascript, fires when this line is clicked.

<script language="vbscript"><!--
Sub theVBSx()
     answer = MsgBox("and how it appears", 0, "For IE Browsers")
End Sub
--> </script>

• This is the way that you would add vbscript into the head of your document.
• It also can be added to the body of the document depending on when you want it to load.
• For good form you can include type="text/vbscript" as well as the language="vbscript".

  • This is where the vbscript fires, IE4+ & IE5+ browsers only.

<style type="text/css"><!--
p.stylesx {letter-spacing:5px}
--></style>

• Last and definitely not least is using this method to add stylesheet definitions to your page.
• In this example a paragraph that has class="stylesx" added within its tag will display the letters of the paragraph 5px apart.

  • This paragraph for the style defined in the head.

Hope that this helps you...

Author: Joseph Raymond

28^th of March, 2001