GETTING FOUND BY SEARCH ENGINES UTILIZING HTML META TAGS
WHAT ARE META TAGS?
The META tag in html is not required, however, many search engines, spiders and robots look for these tags to pinpoint your page in a search. META tags allow the author to specify a brief description, list of keywords and other variables to identify a webpage without actually displaying this information to the public.
There are several META tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the description and keywords tags. The description tag returns a description of the page in place of the summary the engine would ordinarily create. The keywords tag provides keywords for the engine to associate with your page.
An Example being:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Your Page</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Everything you wanted to know about me, my family,my dog,my school.">
<META name="keywords" content="Denver,Colorado,Boulder,Colorado University, pets, dogs, cats,families">
</HEAD>
HOW DO META TAGS WORK?
Utilizing META tags, you tell the directories what you want to say in your listing, instead of relying on what they find in the first 250 characters of your webpage. In this case the directory listing would appear as:
Your Page Everything you wanted to know about me, my family, my dog, my school.
The keyword tag gives your page a chance to come up if someone types in any of the words listed when searching for those subjects.
HOW TO USE META TAGS
META tags are contained within the <HEAD> <TITLE></TITLE></HEAD> elements, They are not visible to the average browser. In the description tag, use a 25 word or less description of the webpage.
Remember: in a directory listing, these are the words the world will see when your directory listing appears.
Use as many keywords as possible, use combinations.
There are a few other META tag functions worth mentioning:
- Page Refresh: This tag will display the page in which it's placed, and then after 15 seconds will display http://yourwebpage.com
<META http-equiv="refresh"content="15;URL=http://yourwebpage.com">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
- Other META Variables that can be included:
- <META name=resource-type content="document">
- <META name=distribution content="LOCAL">
- <META name=copyright content="copyright">
- <META HTTP-EQUIV=Reply-To content="email">
- <META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="31 days">
- <LINK REV=made href="mailto:drclue@cnw.com">
- <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO8859-1">
- <META NAME="rating" CONTENT="General"> (General,Mature,Restricted,14 years)
Not all search engines support this tag. As an alternative, all the major engines support the robots.txt convention of blocking indexing.