About meta-tags?

[CaptainB]

Hi!

I have a couple questions about meta-tags:

1: Is it most effective to fx write like this: " Panel, Panels " or does the crawler only react on "panel" ?

2: It's best to set the "<meta name="revisit" content="After 1 days" />" to a short time (1 day) or a long time (more days)?

3: Is it best to set the "<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />" to index,follow or index,nofollow etc?

Thanks :)

[Pennimus]

1) It doesn't matter - meta keywords are ignored by search engines.

2) It doesn't matter - search engines revisit a site based on external factors and how often your content is updated, not how often you tell them to.

3) Depends how you want engines to behave. "index" means they will index the page, "noindex" means they won't. "follow" means they will follow links on a page, "nofollow" means they won't.

If you want them to both index the page and follow the links on it then don't bother using the robots meta tag, as "index, follow" is the default behaviour anyway.

[Bill Posters]

1) It doesn't matter - meta keywords are ignored by search engines.
That's not entirely true.
They are indexed by Inktomi which contributes to a number of other search engines.

The use of the meta keyword is unlikely to have traffic flooding in, but it can contribute to a site's relevance to less common keywords.


It's advised that keywords are optimised for page-specific content, rather than using the same meta keywords on every page.

As said, returns aren't likely to be substantial, but there's no harm in adding them (properly/dynamically) and potential traffic to be gained by using them.

[CaptainB]

Thanks for the answears, that helped a lot.

[richrich]

if there is nothing else on the page, you can see Google use the meta for the description snippet. So you can maximise your CTR