In our last episode,
the said:
Which Meta should I place on an HTML head and what are the maximum
length of each one?
Most META tags are useless or worse. Start with none and add only those you
know you need or at least have a use for.
In this moment I have only:
http-equiv, description and keywords ...
http-equiv is useless for documents served on the web. The purpose of
http-equiv was intended to be to provide information that should come from
http headers. If the document is served by an http server, the http headers
have already been sent and digested --- it is too late by the time the META
tag occurs. If the http server is not sending the right headers, META
HTTP-EQUIV cannot help the situation. The solution is to get the server to
send the right headers: details of how to do that vary by brand of server
and the access priviledges you may have.
In theory, http-equiv might be useful if you were preparing document that
would not be served, but would be browsed as file offline. But it is not
clear to me that browsers have really implemented any ability to use
http-equiv in any useful way in such situations.
Keywords is useless. Reputable search engines (such as Google) ignore the
keywords header at best, and rumor has it that excessive use of keywords may
actually lower your ranking. This is the result of keyword spamming, which
is the practice of packing the keywords header with words of little or no
relation to the content in order to get search engine hits even when the
content of you page has nothing to do with the search string. If you have a
local search engine for a local site, you might make use of keywords in some
intelligent way, but if you are preparing pages for an ordinary web site,
forget it.
Some search engines use the description header instead of the first few
lines of markup when they report hits (others use the context in which
matches to the search string were found). You want a description header if
the first few lines of your markup are navigation links or something of the
sort which gives no clue about the contents of the page. Because of how the
description header may be used, you don't want it to be very long.
And of course the page Title.
You won't exceed any practical limits on title unless you are trying some
funny business. An abstract of the document does not go in the title, and
the only reason I can think you would want a very long title is that you are
trying to spam --- that is attract search engine hits that the content of
your page does not merit.
I am not sure about the maximum length of description, keywords and
title.
Ditto.
And I am not sure if I should have more meta in my page.
Less is more.
