Meta Tags and Footer

Meta tags provide information about your information – they describe the nature of your website. Their main use is to help search engines and their robots to index your website correctly, i.e. to help the right people find it. The information you supply is included in the header of each webpage. It should represent the content of the site as a whole - the meta information is the same on every page, it currently cannot be customized for different modules or pages.

Be aware that the major search engines use different strategies for indexing websites. They may place different weightings on meta tags or even ignore them completely. Careful use of meta information may help your website to gain better search engine rankings and it is useful to seek information on the indexing strategies of your dominant referrers (see your website logfile). This may help you to optimise your meta information or other aspects of your site design and content to improve your rankings.

Try to be accurate and honest in providing meta information. Don’t try to ‘manipulate’ search engines to gain a better ranking – they may recognise this behaviour and your site may be downgraded or blacklisted from their index.

The Meta Tags and Footer section of the control panel has the following options:

Field	Description
Meta keyword	The keywords meta tag is a series of keywords that represents the content of your site. Type in keywords with each separated by a comma or a space in between. (Ex. XOOPS, PHP, mySQL, portal system). Choose words that: i) accurately reflect the content of your website and ii) are likely to be entered as search terms.
Meta description	The description meta tag is a general description of what is contained in your web page, for example a short sentence. It should be accurate and concise.
Meta robots	The Robots Tag declares to search engines what content to index and spider. There are four options here: i) index, follow ii) no index, follow iii) index, no follow and iv) no index, no follow. ‘Index’ asks robots to include this site in the search engine index; ‘No index’ asks them to exclude the site. ‘Follow’ asks robots to also look at pages linked from the site, and ‘no follow’ asks them not to. Note that these are requests only - the behaviour and policies of a robot are controlled by its masters. Not all robots will recognise - or obey - these tags.
Meta rating	The rating meta tag defines your site age and content rating. Options are i) general, ii) 14 years; iii) restricted and iv) mature. This may be used by content ‘filters’ as a guide to the appropriateness of your site for a given audience.
Meta author	The author meta tag defines the name of the author of the document being read. Supported data formats include the name, email address of the webmaster, company name or URL.
Meta copyright	The copyright meta tag defines any copyright statements you wish to disclose about your web page documents. If you want to claim ownership of your site’s content or preserve intellectual property rights you should provide this information.
Footer	The footer displays some information at the bottom of each page. Be sure to type links in full path starting from http://, otherwise the links will not work correctly in the modules pages.