[html5] Google search engine

[Brian Tremblay]

On 10/17/12 10:21 PM, David Osborne wrote:
>
> Currently I am unable to get my site to register with google search
> engine... I have submitted it using the link provided;

How old is the site? It may take a bit of time to get listed, more to
get listed at the top of the results for a given search.

> and also be through and validated it...

That's nice, and it may help users if your code is proper, but it won't
make much difference in getting listed by Google.

> I currently don't have any meta tags I have found that some sites
> have these tags... do I need them?
>
> which ones should I be including...

> <meta charset="UTF-8" />

I never do, out of stubbornness, really. My feeling is that the http
headers are the only appropriate place to declare a charset, and if
someone is going to save it on their hard drive, then it's up to their
software to do something sensible so that, when they look at their local
copy, they know the charset.

Almost everyone else will say you should include this. The value should 
be the charset you're actually using, i.e., don't put "UTF-8" in there 
unless that is what the documents are encoded with.

> <meta name="description" content="" />

This will not get you listed sooner, or higher. It may change the text
in the results when you do get listed, though, so feel free to include
it if you want to.

> <meta name="keywords" content="" />

More or less useless. I don't think any search engine looks at keywords
today, if they ever did. Don't bother.

> <meta name="author" content="" />

Google, at least pays attention to author, but only if the author has
verified their authorship and created a Google plus account. It might
help. If you want to jump through the hoops of Google plus, then go for
it, but don't think it will have a huge impact.

> <meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX,NOFOLLOW" /> to display on search
>  engine listings- currently have no meta tags, robot

This can have a very large impact on search engines. This tag tells them 
to index the page where this is included, but not to follow any links 
therein.

More generally, robots meta tags, and robots.txt files, are used to 
/prevent/ or /limit/ search engines from your site, not to encourage 
them to index it. You probably don't want this, unless you want to keep 
certain pages off the listings.

http://www.robotstxt.org/

-- 
Brian Tremblay