TopWebSite Search Engines Guide

Generator - These meta tags indicate the software used to create the web page and is used by some software brands to measure how popular their product is.
<META NAME="generator" CONTENT="program name and version">

Title - This meta tags gives the page a name to identify it on search engines, and in your bookmarks or favourites list. The most common title is.....you guessed it, No Title. Many sites use the companies business name in the meta tags which is fine to get the site found on a search for Smith Bros & Sons, but not if you want to be found by new customers who are searching for generic products or services. It is useful to include your favourite keywords in your title meta tags, preferably at the start, as this carries lots of weight when it comes to ranking a site with search engines.
<TITLE>Your title here</TITLE>

Description - These meta tags should contain your description of your web page. This is generally what people see when your page is listed in search results. Try to make the description enticing to encourage viewers to click on your link. Again include your main keywords within the description meta tags.
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your description here">

Keyword - These meta tags are where you list those words or terms you want to be found under. Try to keep the metat tags keyword list short and separate each word or phrase with a comma. Consider using foreign language variations of your main keywords to attract searches from non-English speaking clients. Do not repeat keywords more than twice in the Keywords meta tags as this can be considered spamming by some engines.
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Your keywords here, keyword1,keyword2">

Robots - Meta tags which instruct search engine spiders to either look at (index) or not (noindex) and to follow the links on the page (follow) or not (nofollow).
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow">
or <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="noindex,follow">
or <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,nofollow">
or <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

Copyright - Used to identify the copyright holders of the web page.
<META NAME="copyright" CONTENT="This page and its contents are copyright 1998-1999 by Simon Conroy. All Rights Reserved>

Revisit - Instructs proxy servers to re-cache your page after the specified time. Useful if your page content changes regularly. These meta tags don't tell search engine spiders to come back, they do that when good and ready.
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="15 days">

Refresh - Instructs browsers to redirect to another page. This happens after a number of seconds specified in the content value. Setting that value to "0" will create an instant redirect. Beware search engines don't like these refresh meta tags.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="5; url=yourpage.html">

Expires - These meta tags instructs the visitors cache to refresh after the number of days indicated in the content value. This can be set to "0" if you have regularily updated content and want each visitor to be presented with the most up to date content.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="15">

Rating - These meta tags assign a content rating to the page and can be set to general, 14 years, restricted or mature.
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="general">