Question about meta tags

[Designer]

Now I'm pretty new (as you all know) to website stuff, and i've recently started using a new portal/forum for my site.

2 questions

Q1.
I'm assuming that for my site to get crawled by robots that i need to have this meta tag somewhere:

meta name='robots' content='index,follow'>

but with < in front of the meta name bit (couldnt work out how to disable html in the post).

BTW im currently using ezboxx portal and megabbs. It doesnt appear that the forum is actually getting crawled, does anyone know how i might be able to get it workin? i've finally added the other meta tags like description and keywords but they dont appear to work either (well according to www.seochat.com).


Q2.

On a site which order do index page extensions work in, would a page index.htm open first if another page called index.asp was there too? as maybe a last resort would be for me to just have a page with some fancy images and links to the bits i want to get crawled and then have it redirect to index.asp after a few seconds. Would that work?

My site url is in my sig, if anyone's can help me out with this i will be eternally greatfull, thanks

[mairving]

Q1. All that does is tell the spiders to index your forum, it doesn't necessarily mean that it will crawl through your site. In the past forums have not been indexed very well. It is a little better now but not great.

Q2. It depends how your site is setup. Whichever is listed first is given precendence.

[Designer]

Thanks Mairving,

Do you think the latter idea i had would be of any benefit, putting a direct links somewhere to the forum to give em something to follow?

[mairving]

Originally Posted by Designer Thanks Mairving, Do you think the latter idea i had would be of any benefit, putting a direct links somewhere to the forum to give em something to follow?

I would doubt that it would help. You might see if megabbs has a SEO hack available.

[Designer]

Will do, thanks again

[HeddaLora]

1. You don't need that tag in order to get spidered. You just have to submit the site to certain major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, etc. (DON'T use those "submit it to everybody at once" services.) It also helps to get links TO your site from other web sites. That's how spiders find your site (besides submitting it to search engines).

2. It depends on how your hosting company has set it up. It can be set up to be anything. You just have to ask them how they have it set.

Spiders will not be able to crawl the forum if it is password-protected before viewing. But if the general public can see the forum, then the spiders can see it too. If there is a link to the forum on your home page, the spiders will be able to find it. You might want to add content to your home page that contains a link to the forums (i.e., in addition to having navigation links on the top or side). (I haven't looked at your site.)

[Designer]

Thats a pretty good point, never really thought about that, the menu is generated by the portal which i believe is giving some grief, the weird thing is i can google serch for keywords in my knowledgebase area and get listings for those and the only link to that is from within the nav menu same as the forum, maybe some text based links on the index page would be a good idea or maybe it's just that the forum (made by www.pd9soft.com) just doesnt give suitable links for robots to follow or something like that

Thanks for your suggestions Heddalora, i'll look into that mate