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TIPS FOR META TAGS
If your site is not registered with
the major search engines, customers who use the web to search for
your product or service may well not find you.
No matter what you do with META-tags,
over a relatively short period of time your positioning on the search
engines will disimprove as they give extra priority to
new submissions.
The only way to remain high on search
engines results is to resubmit your site every month. They
even recommend this !
It takes on average one hour and
40 minutes to submit your website to the top 25 search engines
manually.
12 x 1 hour 40 minutes=20 hours,
the amount of time in one year spent resubmitting to the top 25
search engines.
TIPS
META-tags are lines of Hyper Text Markup Language
(HTML) at the start of a page's source code. META-tags are not visible
to the visitor of your web page, but it will assist many of the
major search engines in finding and identifying your files and site
information.
A search engine will usually do this by looking
at the content of your web page. With META-tags you have more control
over the way that a search engine interprets your web page, and
you can also add valuable information to a page that may not contain
much text within it's main body.
There are several types of META-tag that serve
various purposes, but the two most important are the the 'Description'
META-tag, and the 'Keyword' META-tag. We will look at these in more
depth, and show you how to enter them into your web page.
This guide to META-tags is only an introduction
to the subject. We have accumulated knowledge of how search engines
work over a period of time. If you would like us to help you with
the META-tagging of your web site, please call or email us.
WHERE ARE META-TAGS PLACED?
The META-tags should be listed immediately following
the <TITLE> line. The source code should look something like
this:
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>the page name goes here</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="description
goes here">
<META name="keywords" content="first keyword,second
keyword">
</HEAD>
THE "DESCRIPTION" META-TAG
A search engine will usually take the first 150
characters of your web page, and use this as the description of
your site. This is what the user will see when your site is listed
in their results. This can cause problems if you have either a graphically
intensive site, with very little text, or a page that contains 150
characters or more of JavaScript at the beginning of it's source
code.
The description META-tag will allow you to choose
exactly what you want the search engine to display when your site
appears within the results. An example of source code would resemble
...
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Gaskin & Associates Ltd</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Building ecommerce
for the Future !">
</HEAD>
The description should therefore appear within
the search engine results:
Gaskin & Assocaites Ltd
Building ecommerce for the Future !
THE "KEYWORD" META-TAG
Keywords are the words that the user enters into
the search engine in order to find your site. The keyword META-tag
can contain up to 1000 characters, but each individual keyword must
be separated by a comma. The source code including keywords would
resemble ...
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Gaskin & Associates Ltd</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Building ecommerce
for the Future !">
<META name="keywords" content="web designer, ecommerce,
database driven site">
</HEAD>
If someone was to search for either web designer,
ecommerce, database driven site, your site would therefore be one
of the sites selected.
FUTHER TIPS ON META-TAGS
- Place META-tags on all of the pages that you wish to promote.
- Do not repeat keywords more than 7 times. If you do the
search engines may ignore the entire list of keywords or give
you a low listing as a penalty.
- Try to make the keywords appear within the body of text
as much as is possible. If you have a graphically intensive site
with little or no text, you can use the ALT attribute within the
<IMG> tag to add the keywords to the body of the page.
- Some search engine spiders such as Altavista's and Lycos'
place great importance on the words located nearest the top of
a page.
- It is not a good idea to place the names of your competitors
in your keywords, in the hope that their clients will come across
your site rather than their's on the Internet. There are laws
about passing yourself off as another company.
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