Meta tags

[Teresa Fernandes]

Hi,
In the bilingual site the tag Keywords and the tag Description (section HEAD), must be differents for the portuguese pages and the english pages or all site pages must have both versions?
Thanks!

[boogyman]

they can contain whatever you specify for them as the content... the attribute names eg <meta http-equiv="" content=""> etc... must stay the same, but if its free text, you can enter whatever you wish in as the value..

now on that note, if you are going to convert a site into a language thats not english, it would be wise to also change the meta tags to reflect that other language

[techno_race]

You do not absolutely need a <meta> tag to indicate page language. You can simply use a universal character set, such mas UTF-16.

[jscheuer1]

You don't even need meta tags at all for the sort of thing you are talking about (though what techno_race mentions - the meta http-equiv="Content-Type" tag could be important to make sure each page displays properly - however this is best set on the server side if possible).

If your page has a descriptive title and is organized with headings for important sections and contains words relating to its content in the text used in the body of the page, search engines will pick it up just fine without any meta description or meta keyword tags in the head.

[boogyman]

I heard that a couple of search engine's, most notably "Google" doesn't even check those values anymore because of spiders and abuse of the meta tags for better page rank, whether done intentionally or not