FP2000: Using the META Element with Web Spiders, RobotsID: Q205493
|
Web spiders (also called "robots") are a great resource for people searching the Internet, but they present a problem to Web page designers who want their pages to be seen and properly indexed. One popular solution to this behavior is to use the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) META element.
The META element is placed in the HEAD element to embed document meta-
information that is not defined by other HEAD elements. This embedded
information can be extracted by servers and clients to identify, index, and
catalog specialized document meta-information. A META element can be
written in one of two forms: META NAME and META HTTP-EQUIV. The NAME
attribute is returned in the HEAD of the document, while the HTTP-EQUIV
attribute is converted into the HTTP response header, which is parsed by the Web server.
If you plan to use a web spider, you should use the META NAME form as shown in these examples:
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="John Doe">
<META NAME="date" CONTENT="12/31/97">
The NAME attribute declares a variable for the page and the CONTENT
attribute assigns a value to the variable.
Description | A brief description of the Web page. |
Keywords | One or more words that refer to the content that can be found on the page. |
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Web Spider Information">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="robots, spiders">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="The Jogging Page">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="jogging, health, fitness">
NOTE: Some web spiders ignore the NAME attribute and use their own algorithm to generate a description of the page.
Additional query words: kbhowto 2000RTMPublic
Keywords : fpedit fphtml
Version : WINDOWS:
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbinfo
Last Reviewed: July 1, 1999