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Visitor Questions on Meta Tags

Periodically visitors to Help For Web Beginners send in their questions. Rather than simply respond directly to their inquiries, their question and our answer will be shared with everyone. What follows are those questions related to the use of Meta Tags.

Meta Tags on Flash Driven Websites

If I use Flash can I still include meta tags?

Yes.

If you use flash on your website, you will need to take advantage of the places where you can put content that will help the search engines learn what each page talks about. This would include the use of the title, keyword, and description meta tags. However, some have claimed to be penalized by the search engines when using the keyword tag on a flash site where there is no text appearing on the screen that relates to the keywords listed in the keyword tag. I would suggest that you limit your keyword tag to a few keywords/phrases that you use in your title and description meta tags.

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Frequently Asked Question About Robots.txt

What if I do not have a robots file - how does that effect my site?

It will not hurt your website if you do not have a robots file.

I would highly recommend that you always use a robots.txt file on your websites, if for no other reason than to protect your image files from being included on the Google and MSN image searches.

While having an image in the results may bring you website traffic, it will be mainly from folks looking for a picture to use on their own website or materials. Unfortunately, the way the images are presented in these searches somewhat leaves the uneducated with the idea that they are free to use these images.

Why not take a few moments to protect your copyright by blocking the search engines from including your images that is preactically encouraging folks to steal your work?

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About the Author

HelpForWebBeginners.com is a website dedicated to providing free, easy to understand, online How To's for true web beginners. While the materials are not free or available for reprints, they are offered freely for individual use. Please use the contact page to let Michele know if this tutorial has been helpful or if there are any other beginner web programming or MySpace related tutorials you would like to see.