The best meta tag???

Hey guys, I have seen many different meta tags, but which one is the best???


I too have a forum -- It is gaming related, what's the best meta tag for it? The one for this forum is

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Code (markup):

Is this one a good one? My site uses this one:

<!-- nocache headers -->
<meta content="no-cache" http-equiv="pragma" />
<meta content="no-cache" http-equiv="no-cache" />
<meta content="-1" http-equiv="expires" />
<meta content="no-cache" http-equiv="cache-control" />
<!-- end nocache headers -->

<title>Homepage Name</title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="vBadvanced, vBulletin 3.0.3" />
<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,bulletin board" />
<meta name="description" content="This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin." />

<!-- CSS Stylesheet -->

Code (markup):

it seems to damn big, will search engine accept mine?




Which of the two is the best?

 

Use <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> for you forum, as all data will probably be ISO-8859-1 encoded.

If you have the oppurtunity to move onto UTF-8 i suggest you do, it suppots a hell of a lot of char sets including arabic, japanesse etc.

 

ok thanks, but how do i move to UTF-8, also, should i remove all other meta tags? could you show me the entire meta tag i need for a search engine to index me?


Thanks in advance

 

Meta tags depend on what you need...

You have a nice tutorial about SEO-ing your header.

Anyway, to be spidered by Google you will need, mostly, tools... And there isn't a "best" meta tags, all are important and have diferent aplications. You shouldn't use all of them to achieve good on-page results tough, only the ones you need...

 

First off, I must thank everyone for the quick responses, thank you.

Now, I have a vBulletin, it comes with 3 chunks of meta tag on front page and 2 chunks on posts. I will show you:


On the front page, these are the meta's vBulletin came with:

<!-- nocache headers -->
<meta content="no-cache" http-equiv="pragma" />
<meta content="no-cache" http-equiv="no-cache" />
<meta content="-1" http-equiv="expires" />
<meta content="no-cache" http-equiv="cache-control" />
<!-- end nocache headers -->

<title>Homepage Name</title>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="vBadvanced, vBulletin 3.0.3" />
<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,bulletin board" />
<meta name="description" content="This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin." />

.
.
.
.
.About 3/4 page down theres another meta chunk
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 3.0.3" />
<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,bulletin board" />
<meta name="description" content="This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin." />

Code (markup):

Then, in posts, these 2 are the meta's:

	<title>Forum Name - Get ready for something big...</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 3.0.3" />
<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,bulletin board" />
<meta name="description" content="This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin." />

.
.
.
.Again, about 3/4 page down another chunk of meta tags
.
.
.
.
.


<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 3.0.3" />
<meta name="keywords" content="vbulletin,forum,bbs,discussion,jelsoft,bulletin board" />
<meta name="description" content="This is a discussion forum powered by vBulletin." />

Code (markup):

As you can see, they both contain the:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

Code (markup):

Along with a ton of other junk, the thing is that half the junk is like 3/4 of the way, down is this ok?

Will these meta tags give me the best out of my page ranking?





Thanks a million in advance.

 

*BUMP* Please tell me if it will work THANKS!

 

*BUMP* Please tell me if it will work THANKS!

 

First, this is a forum, so you will not receive "live" answers, so don't *BUMP* threads, there is no need for that... Also, it's 1st January 2005, people are sleeping, celebrating, going for a walk... I don't know, but most of them aren't here...

Second, those metatags are incorrect, and you should remove them along other junk. You can do that with modifications on the php code or the templates, don't know quite sure how vBulletin works. Also, you should read the tutorial on the link I gave you, so you can understand better how SEO works. After that search a lot in this forum and you will see most of your questions answered

Happy new year!

 

Thanks for the reply, I will just copy this sites meta tag, that outa work...

 

Ok
Perhaps this would help if you actually read this, instead of stealing other peoples work.

Even though it is true, that you may have a forum site, this is not a gaming forum.
So, no copy/paste of these meta-tags is probably not the best idea.

Just my 2 cents

 

The only one that really matters is the title, and that should be changed from the default to:

<title>Page or topic title : Forum Name</title>

Code (markup):

 

I agree with Minstrel on this, but I would also add a meta description and a meta keyword tag. All the rest are totally unnecessary as far as I am concerned.