meta tags tool at About.com

decibel.places's picture

He has: 1,494 posts

Joined: Jun 2008

The jury is out if metatags mean anything to search bots anymore

Here is a "fill in the form" meta tag generator at Jenn Kyrnin's About.com site

Besides the usual title, keywords and description also has options for name, email, copyright and reload (meta refresh/redirect)

ariyes's picture

They have: 2 posts

Joined: Mar 2008

META TAG is not working Now a days.

decibel.places's picture

He has: 1,494 posts

Joined: Jun 2008

not sure what you mean by not working

you mean a lot of search engine algorithms disregard it? probably true

but most SEO experts recommend still using keywords and description meta tags

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I wouldn't say the jury is out at all. The jury is in agreement:

Title - very, very important (but I still have a hard time thinking of this as a meta tag for some reason)

Keywords - might matter *a little bit* in yahoo and some other engines but largely not useful at all

Description - might be used in actual serp listings and might be helpful to get users to click your listing. On the other hand, if you don`t have one the SE will get one for you from the page text.

Copyright, author etc. - not sure that these are ever used for anything.

Robots, refresh, cache - these actually do something

Charset - useful to ensure your special characters get rendered properly.

Expires - might be useful but again, I`m not sure it`s ever actually used for anything. I`ve read that it might help with caching but most user agents and search engines ignore it.

Methinks this aboot.com person doesn`t really know what she`s talking about...

decibel.places's picture

He has: 1,494 posts

Joined: Jun 2008

Megan,

Yes, I usually hand write my meta tags or more often use the Drupal module

I think Jenn's About.com site is slightly orientated to beginners and she is trying to at least get some meta tags going without explaining the intricacies of charset etc

Did you see the link at the bottom Magic with Meta Tags which does go into more depth?

Jenn has been coding websites as long as you and I and I believe she knows what she's doing

I posted the link here as a useful tool to generate some basic metatags.

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

netsperience wrote:
I think Jenn's About.com site is slightly orientated to beginners and she is trying to at least get some meta tags going without explaining the intricacies of charset etc

Did you see the link at the bottom Magic with Meta Tags which does go into more depth?

That article implies that meta keywords helps improve rankings which is flat out wrong (unless it was written years and years ago, in which case it should be marked as outdated). Spreading information like this just leads to more confusion and the continued problem we have in educating people about SEO.

greg's picture

He has: 1,581 posts

Joined: Nov 2005

Slightly off-topic..
I've read some helpful tutorials on about.com in the past, but now I know PHP on a much higher level, I can pick faults all the time with their scripts.

I once emailed the author of one script to tell them a bit of code in a tutorial they had was extremely unsecure.
Suggested they state it's not secure or make the code secure, like Tizag does at the bottom always says this is basic script, not secure blah.

I got no reply.
(Maybe they changed the script)

decibel.places's picture

He has: 1,494 posts

Joined: Jun 2008

Jenn Kyrnin's About.com site does not cover PHP

It is specific to HTML and CSS with sometimes a little JavaScript
thrown in

About.com segments things and assigns different "expert" guides to cover different areas of expertise

IMO Jenn's credentials are excellent

I found her site when I could not locate a certain syntactical reference I needed on w3schools but Jenn's site had it

I have found Jenn to be responsive to contact, and she will often send a cordial thank you for a cogent comment posted on her site

greg's picture

He has: 1,581 posts

Joined: Nov 2005

netsperience wrote:
Jenn Kyrnin's About.com site does not cover PHP

It is specific to HTML and CSS with sometimes a little JavaScript
thrown in


Well perhaps Jenn Kyrnin doesn't cover PHP, but about.com have a subdomain dedicated to PHP stuff.

http://php.about.com/

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I usualy find their content to be inadequate, even on topics I don't know a lot about. I usually avoid clicking on their links on the serps if I can help it.

pr0gr4mm3r's picture

He has: 1,502 posts

Joined: Sep 2006

The only thing I would say about this is that I would absolutely not put my email address in a meta tag. I don't think I could make it any easier for bots to find it.

decibel.places's picture

He has: 1,494 posts

Joined: Jun 2008

most of us have multiple email addresses for different purposes

my "public" email address is [email protected] and I expect a lot of spam - Yahoo has workable filters and multiple delete tools etc

I have other emails I use professionally or personally

one might want to include a "public" email in a meta tag for maximum exposure, realizing it will also attract a lot of dross

He has: 629 posts

Joined: May 2007

Some of those META tags Jenn mentions may not be used on the web, but are useful for saved pages when the HTTP headers are not available. I'm thinking about CHARSET in particular.

The EXPIRES information should be coming from the HTTP headers, in which case the META will be ignored.

The REFRESH is useful when testing in a local environment, as you can leave the browser window open while making changes to the document, and the changes will show up within the time you specify - every ten seconds, say.

Cordially, David
--
delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;

They have: 62 posts

Joined: May 2008

I think meta tags i always work but now on these days CHARSET in particular. Or you can use mail address in meta tags

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