Common Meta Tags (Dublin Core)

Actually, we already encountered the Dublin Core way of meta tagging. The previous page was an example of meta tags observing the Dublin core mechanism.These tags are the ones which can be included in almost every page. What we can do is have these tags to be common meta tags which are present in almost all the webpages that we develop irrespective of the content matter. This would help us to keep our webpages uniform. So even if you have three lines of text on the webpage try and include this set of meta tags on that page.

Note: Addition of Meta tags does not alter the display of content when viewed on the browser. They just help those crawlers crawl better!

Page-defining Meta Tags

In addition to that we may have to include a few more meta tags that define the page. For instance, for our Library Systems Office homepage we may have the following tag:

<meta name="Description" content="Library Systems Office, UIUC, Main Library, Computer and technology support, hardware and software needs, Gateway, Log request, maintenance and support, server support, proxy server, library databases, Library images, Library web pages, Library utilities,Systems Status,Voyager, Current Library Projects">

Techie Tips:

If you are interested to talk to web spiders (mere software programs) then we can suggest you a few things that you may consider including into your webpage. Spiders do this job of indexing web pages for the search engine. All you got to do is include this meta tag.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">

Some of the other possible entries could be:

NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed.
NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages.
NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed.
NOIMAGECLICK prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead there will only be a link to the page.