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| THE WEB STANDARDS GROUP RECOMMENDS the use of <TITLE> and <META> tags in all UCSB Web pages. Title and meta tags are part of the HTML header of a Web page. The title tag creates the words that appear in the top bar of your Web browser. A meta tag provides information to Web crawlers, such as the AUTHOR, KEYWORD, and DESCRIPTION. Title and meta tags factor prominently in how your pages are ranked by many of the top search engines.
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<TITLE> tag:
The HTML code for a title tag looks like this:
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<TITLE>Chemistry Department Home Page</TITLE>
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| The title tag belongs in the <HEAD> section of your source code, and is generally followed by your Meta description and Meta keywords tags. |
| The <TITLE> tag should be short (ideally seven words or less) and descriptive. Keep in mind that this will be the title in users' bookmarks, so if every page title starts with "University of California Santa Barbara" then all bookmarks will look alike. Put the more significant part of the name first, e.g., "<title>Meta Tags - Web Standards - UCSB</title>". |
| <META> tags: |
WSG recommends that the following <META> tags be used in all campus Web pages:
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content-language – May be used to declare the natural language of the document. May be used by robots to categorize by language. The corresponding Accept-Language header (sent by a browser) causes a server to select an appropriate natural language document. All RFC1766 compliant languages are supported.
e.g., <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="EN-US">
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content-type – Using this tag is recommended. Failure to do so may cause display problems where, for instance, the document uses UTF-8 punctuation characters but is displayed in ISO or ASCII charsets.
e.g., <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
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author – Typically the unqualified author's name. WSG recommends using the name of the organization responsible for the page.
e.g., <META NAME="author" CONTENT="Office of Public Affairs, webmaster@ucsb.edu">
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copyright – Typically an unqualified copyright statement. WSG recommends using the UC Regents, as shown in the example.
e.g., <META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="© Copyright 2005 The Regents of the University of California">
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description – A short, plain-language description of the document. Used by search engines to describe your document. Particularly important if your document has very little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts at the top.
e.g., <META NAME="description" CONTENT="THE UCSB NEWS PAGE features the latest news and press releases from the University of California, Santa Barbara.">
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keywords – Keywords used by search engines to index your document in addition to words from the title and document body. Typically used for synonyms and alternates of title words.
e.g., <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="news, press releases">
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| These <META> tags are considered optional: |
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expires – Expiration date of the document, e.g., <META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 26 Feb 2006 08:21:57 GMT">
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pragma – Causes the browsers to not locally cache documents, e.g., <META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
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cache-control – Specifies the action of cache agents (i.e. proxy servers).
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robots – Controls Web robots on a per-page basis. Specifies whether to index the page and/or follow links.
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pics-label – Includes rating information in terms of adult content so content filters can do their job.
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rating – To indicate the rating of the site in terms of adult content, e.g., <META NAME="rating" CONTENT="GENERAL">
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WSG is continuing the discussion of <META> tags. Examples and additional tags will be added to this page. |
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