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META TAGS

Meta Tags Many search engines recieve thousands of submissions every day, so, they use computer programs, called "spiders" to check out your site after it is submitted. Each search engine has its own special spiders so it is difficult to make generalizations about them. However it is a fact that many spiders will examine the "meta tags" on your page to see if your page meets their standards and to see how your page should be placed within their data. Meta tags are special, embedded text statments that are placed, hidden, on your page, and carry specific kinds of information about your page. Meta tags are placed, or should be placed, within the "head" section of your page. Often, your page "generator" software (such as Front Page, Page Mill, Composer, or other) provides a mechanism for inserting the meta tags, but if you aren't aware of meta tags they may put meaningless data in them, or put in no meta tags at all.

To see the meta tags, open your page using Internet Explorer (or equivalent browser) and click on VIEW and then on SOURCE. (You will be viewing the html source code for your page.) Relatively near the top of the source code you may see the term Meta name = .... This data will be hidden from the normal browser view, because it is enclosed within the right and left pointing arrows.

Text within these arrows is hidden from the normal view and is called a "tag". Tags are usually HTML commands or they are information, such as the "meta names" (also called "meta tags") which are supposed to identify the subject of your page for the search engines. Here, we are interested only in the meta tags for "description","title", and "key words". They will look something like this:

meta name="title" content="The Great American Web Site"

meta name="description" content="Links and information to help site owners "

meta name="keywords" content="information,help,site,owners, URL,address,search,engine"

If these do occur on your site, and they do not accurately reflect your site, you should change them so that they do reflect your site. You can accomplish this using Internet Explorer, Front Page, the editor provided by your space provider, or other editor, by editing the HTML source code for your page directly, and saving the changes.
(NOTE: To skip my hint and go directly to the search engine submission links Click Here).

The "description" meta tag should have a relatively brief (say 35 words or less) description of your page. Some search engines will show this actual description on their page anytime someone "finds" your page during a search. So, the description should be brief and accurate.

The "title" meta tag should, of course, be an attractive title for your page.

The "keywords" should be those that you would expect someone using a search engine to use in looking for a page like yours. ALSO those key words absolutelyshould occur on your page in the normal, visible text ... several times. Some search engines have artificially intelligent spiders that will examine your page to make sure that the keywords and description do describe your page, and if they do not the search engine may reject your site. I recommend using less than 10 key words if you can help it. Too many key words seems to diminish the chances that any one search will match your page directly, so don't overdo it.

It's better to have a few highly focused key words than alot of "related" key words. When someone searches on a search engine, your page looks more relevant to the search engine if all the key words for your page match their search terms. If you have alot of extaneous or maginal keywords it may make it look less relevant to any specific search, and therefore less likely that anyone will find your page. (This is based, in part, on a story in the September 2000 Issue of WEB PRO NEWS.)

If you look at your page and there are no meta tags, then type in meta tags for your page in as I have described (or use your generator software to insert meta tags). They should be placed in the head section near the top of the page (between the head tag and the /head tag.)

You can use my meta tags on this page, as models. To view them so you can cut and paste them, click on VIEW and SOURCE (in Internet Explorer, or the equivalent for your browser.) Then look in the head section near the top. You can cut and past the meta tags from this page (cutting and pasting will not harm this page) into a word processor, edit them for your page, and then cut and paste them into the html on your page. (You cannot cut and paste the visible visible "meta tags" above because the left and right pointing arrows are graphics and are not real.)

In your page's meta tags you must include the commands, arrows, and quotation marks exactly as shown in the meta tags on this page. Only the text within the quotes, the description or key words, should be changed.