Hi,
I've made my website using a readymade template and it includes the following meta tags in the head of the html document.



My questions are
* is this meta http-equiv different then the normal meta tag where i have to use keywords ?
* Is there any Javascript code to make this meta thing automatic or do I really have to make seperate meta headers with different keywords?
* Is there any way i can make my website appear on search engines apart from using meta tags ?

Thanks
Shalini

To my knowledge, Google doesn't use meta tags much. Most search engines don't.

While most search engines do not use Meta tags, it never hurts to have them. If you want to appear on search engines, naturally, then make your <h1><h2> tags important, place keywords here. Also highlight your keywords throughout your pages in <b> tags. Spiders as they crawl your site will look for these tags to provide keyword placement. HOWEVER, do not go overboard and make everything in bold, this will just get you blacklisted.

Hi,

Like some of the other posters have said, the importance of meta tags are not as great as they use to be with regards to search engines. However, some search engines still do use them and I think Google even uses them but in a very very minor way. After all Google uses algorithms that take into account something like 700+ variables!

I also want to point out that meta tags can and are used for different purposes than just search engine placements etc. For instance, you can use meta tags to refresh a page after a certain period of time, you can use it to mark when the content of the page expires, you can use them to redirect the user to another page, and as in your example you can use it to specify the content type.

Now to answer a few of your questions...

* The http-equiv you are using there is for content type. That one is specifying that the page is text/html based and using a particular character set. You often see a meta tag like this to specify when a page is using Unicode (UTF-8) which can be important. Yes, it is different than the one that you use to specify keywords. That meta tag is more for the search engines that used it for search indexing... again hardly used as the other posters said.

* You don't find javascript that can add meta tags automatically. You can find software products like Dreamweaver or frongpage that do put in meta tags automatically when they create the page code. You can use the same set of meta tags on different pages, they don't have to be different although it is a good idea to tailor your keywords to that page's specific content just to make it more relevant.

* Most certainly! Google and many other search engines these days automatically crawl your site through links on other sites or by direct submission when you submit the URL directly to them. They then crawl your site and index the words found on it. They then rank your site on a bunch of different criteria, but mostly by figuring out how many popular sites are linking to you as well. That is why it is important that you get your URL out on other sites, and link up with sites that are in the same field of discussion as you. This method of getting others to link to you to increase your own site's popularity is known to Google as "PageRank".

You can read more about PageRank at the URLs below. Hope this information addresses your questions adequately!

PageRank Explained
PageRank on Wikipedia

Enjoy!

meta elements that use the http-equiv attribute instead of the name attribute are different in that they are supposed to be equivalent to setting an HTTP header. In theory, a server would serve the equivalent HTTP header as a result of adding the relevant meta element in your document. In reality, no server does this, although I would imagine that you could make it possible via PHP or XSLT.

Regarding the particular meta element referenced—<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">—the first part—text/html—sets the media (MIME) type; it’s ignored by browsers. The most useful part is the second part, the charset parameter, which may be used by a browser to set the character encoding used to read the document in the absence of a real HTTP header. Note that the charset parameter does not actually set the character encoding; it only specifies whatever encoding you used to save the document with so that the browser doesn’t have to guess.

You can set the relevant HTTP headers to get around the requirement for meta http-equiv elements. When using meta elements that use the name attribute, you will need a separate element for each name value. There isn’t really any way to get around that.

Submit it to them directly or wait for them to index it. They should get around to indexing it when pages that they’ve already indexed start linking to yours or when someone visits your site using one of their plug‐ins.

b elements should not be used since they are presentational in nature. You can mark words for emphasis using the em or strong elements or, otherwise, by using span or other inline elements. You can then use CSS to make the text bold; for example: font-weight: bolder.

Thanks.. Appreciate the detailed information.