WEB MEDIA SCHOOL session 31 - USE OF META TAGS
WEB MEDIA SCHOOL session 31 - USE OF META TAGS
You can increase your site's visibility with well-chosen and well-deployed keyword phrases.Begin by brainstorming all of the words that can be used to describe your products, your business, and your industry. More to the point, try to figure out all of the words that prospective customers might use when they come looking for you. You will probably end up with a long list, consisting of both very specific words that name your products as well as more generic words that describe your type of products and your industry.
Now edit your list down to no more than 15 multiple-word phrases. And make sure that your editing process eliminates as many duplications of words as possible, since some search engines regard more than three repetitions of a keyword as spamdexing.
It will probably not be difficult to get a high search-engine placement with specific keywords like your company name. The real challenge is to get a high listing with the generic words that apply to the industry you are in and the products you sell or promote.
Present your keywords
Once you have selected your list of keywords, you need to put them in your web pages in such a way that the search engines' robots and spiders will properly index your site. Obviously, you will include your list of keywords in the META "keywords" tag, but you will also want to use your keywords in your site title and in your description of your site. Adding keywords simply requires editing the HTML code and adding the meta tags, as in the following example. The top of a web page source code on your site might look like:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>ACME Corporation Devices Information</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>ACME Corporation Innovative Opening Devices Information</H1>Create a META tag with the following information:
<META name="keywords" content="brochure">
To add additional keywords,
<META name="keywords" content="brochure, widget, wholesale">
actual example ..The top of your HTML document would then look like:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>ACME Corporation Devices Information</TITLE>
<META name="keywords" content="brochure, widget, wholesale">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>ACME Corporation Innovative Devices Information</H1>
Questions and answers about META keywords Q) META keywords tag - should I use UPPERCASE, lowercase or a mixture, commas or spaces?
A) Use lowercase, separated by commas, with a space after the comma.
Q) If I have several keyword phrases in my META keywords tag that all contain the same keyword, will I get penalized? For example:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="gold jewelry, diamond jewelry, silver jewelry, platinum jewelry"> This would represent four repetitions of the word 'jewelry'.
A) I personally do not believe in spamming or putting multiple keywords throughout the page. This is too easy to check for and the search engines are not stupid. If we can think of it they already have. Most engines only count to 2 for keywords, so why waste the keyword utilization. Put in other keywords.
Q) Will I be penalized for using the same keywords on a lot of different pages that have the same content?
A) If the pages have exactly the same content, why are they in your site? If they are all related to the same subject, they can logically have the same keywords, but the Description tag would be different.
Q) What is the optimum number of keywords before the engine gets bored?
A) It varies. Some are more easily bored than others. I don't usually repeat keywords, maybe twice for the important ones. It's better to show up adequately on all the engines than perfectly on one and badly on the rest.
Q) Will the engines treat a phrase such as handmade gifts that is written as a keyword phrase the same as if it were written as two different words? Should I write them out both ways?
A) Use: "hand made handmade gift gifts" to cover all the possible variations searchers might enter.
The author of this article is David Notestine, the creator of the Zeus Internet Marketing Robot, rapidly being recognized as the best automated website marketing software on the Internet. His radical views are being embraced by webmasters throughout the web, as the truth about website marketing. Mr Notestine is also the creator the world's first collective search engine: www.zeuscollective.com. .... http://cyber-robotics.com/c/c.pl?webrobots...... The WebProNews Team
KEYWORD THESAURUSThe "TITLE" tag
Most search engines use the title tag as the name of your site in the search results listings. It's not a required tag in HTML syntax, but if you leave it out, your site may show up named "No Title" Some search engines include only the first 60 characters of the title.Some search engines won't use tags They rely on taking words from the text of your page. Especially text in <TITLE></TITLE> tags. Keep this title content length to 60 characters.The META "description" tag
Search engines permit anywhere up to 150 characters in the META description tag. Since this is what will describe your site to most searchers.When indexed by search engines:as well as showing the first 20 - 25 words of your page you can describe your site by using the tag below. You must place all <META> tags between <HEAD> & </HEAD> at the top of the page. You should include this "description" <META> tag on every page. You can include any number of different <META> tags on each page. <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Demonstrations Of Internet Radio">The meta description tag is used to assist those search engines which are meta capable in summarizing your website. The size of the meta description tag should be under 150 characters.The "keywords" <Meta> tag allows you to specify a load of words which are related to your page. When someone enters these words into a suitable search engine your page will have more chance of getting displayed.<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="HTML,Advanced, Search,Floating Frames"> Spiders only read these tags to a certain point (perhaps the first 50 words at most) Don't use hidden keywords in any form. The keywords can include up to 874 characters of text. A large percentage of searchers enter incorrect spellings, so you might want to include common misspellings of your keywords. And be aware that some search engines' agents are case sensitive, so you might want to include punctuation variations as well.
META TAG GENERATOR CLICK HERE - META MAKER-CLICK HERE The robots tag has 4 main "CONTENT" words that you can use, these are "index, follow, noindex & nofollow". If you put "index" the robot indexes your page, if it sees "follow" it will follow the links on that page. The "noindex" and "nofollow" do the opposite. You can have two of these in the tag but you can't have opposite ones, for example "index,noindex" is not allowed.<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
When a site is added to Infoseek's index, all the words on the page are included with the exception of any text within a <Comments> field. The words in the tags are indexed in addition to the rest of the document.The best advice is, work on selecting your keywords and put the most important ones into a paragraph at the start of your HTML document. Put the whole list into a META tag, most important words first. Announce your page or site using one of the multiple submission services such as Entity. Infoseek also indexes the ALT attribute in the [INLINE] tag. If your site mainly consists of graphics, you can also use the ALT attribute to describe your page. Submitting to crawler-based search engines (Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek) is easy. All they need is your home page URL and your email address. Once their spider gets around to visiting your site, it will automatically index all your pages, so there's no need to submit more than the home page URL. lt's a good idea to resubmit your site to all the crawler-based engines at least every six months. Selfpromotion.com is a good auto - submitter. Yahoo is the most popular search site, it's also the hardest to get into. Submit to them manually.
Choose keywords that are customized to your needs. If you have a web site for a company who does business primarily in Florida use "Florida fruit trees" as your keyword phrase. Go to.http://www.goto.com/d/about/advertisers/othertools.jhtml Once there, you'll find a link called "SearchTerm Suggestion List." Click on it and, after a new window opens, enter any term that you wish to research. You will be shown how many searches were done for that and similar terms for the last month.
It‚s always a good idea to have your company name as a keyword, especially if it is in your domain name. This will help even more if a search engine or directory editor examines your site. A good rule of thumb is to not repeat keywords more than 7 times throughout a single page. Try to place your keyword phrase in the first few lines of the body text. The description is typically what directories judge you by and what your visitor will see of your site before actually visiting it.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT META KEYWORDSQ) META keywords tag - should I use UPPERCASE, lowercase or a mixture, commas or spaces?
A) Use lowercase, separated by commas, with a space after the comma.
Q) If I have several keyword phrases in my META keywords tag that all contain the same keyword, will I get penalized? For example:
A) I personally do not believe in spamming or putting multiple keywords throughout the page. This is too easy to check for and the search engines are not stupid. If we can think of it they already have. Most engines only count to 2 for keywords, so why waste the keyword utilization. Put in other keywords.
Q) Will I be penalized for using the same keywords on a lot of different pages that have the same content?
A) If the pages have exactly the same content, why are they in your site? If they are all related to the same subject, they can logically have the same keywords, but the Description tag would be different.
Q) What is the optimum number of keywords before the engine gets bored?
A) It varies. Some are more easily bored than others. I don't usually repeat keywords, maybe twice for the important ones. It's better to show up adequately on all the engines than perfectly on one and badly on the rest.
Q) Will the engines treat a phrase such as handmade gifts that is written as a keyword phrase the same as if it were written as two different words? Should I write them out both ways?
A) Use: "hand made handmade gift gifts" to cover all the possible variations searchers might enter
Below I've listed several other popular tags that you may have seen around the web. The generator META tag is used to specify what program was used to create your web site. Many HTML editing tools automatically insert this so that a company can gauge their market penetration. The tag looks like this:<META name="generator" content="program name and version">
The author tag is used to identify the author of a page. Simply replace "author's name" with your name or email address.
<META name="author" content="author's name">
The copyright tag identifies the individual or company that holds the copyright to a particular page. This is what it looks like:
<META name="copyright" content="This page and all its contents are copyright 1997-1999 by Matt Mickiewicz. All Rights Reserved.">
If you want to prevent a page being saved in your visitor's cache you can do so by inserting the following three tags:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="0">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Cache-Control" CONTENT="no-cache">
Why would you want a page not to be cached? If your site is updated frequently and you always want your visitors to see the newest content/changes, or if you want to ensure that a new banner is loaded each time from your server when a page is accessed, you'll want to use the tags above.
You can also instruct the search engine robot/spider how to index your site using the robots META Tag. This is what it looks like:
<META name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
What the tag above does is tell the spider not to index the page that it appears on, and not to follow the links on that page. Here's a complete list of attributes for the robots tag:
index - the default, the page is added to the search engine database
noindex - the page is not added to the search engine database
nofollow - the spider doesn't follow the links on that page
none - same as "noindex, no follow"To use any of these attributes simply replace the "noindex,nofollow" text in the example above with whatever you want to use. If you need to use more than one attribute, seperate them with a comma.
Have you ever seen a page that automatically refreshes to another URL after a few seconds? Did you ever wondered how it was done? I'll tell you. The page made use of one of the http-equiv META Tags to automatically "pull" you to a different page after a few seconds. Here's what the code looks like:
<META http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=newpage.htm">
The value of content denotes how many seconds will pass before the new page is called for. If you want it to happen as soon as a person hits that page, then set the value to "0".
Meta tags are perhaps the most important aspect of your web page besidesthe actual content. Meta tags are HTML tags that are placed between the
<HEAD> and </HEAD> tags in the HTML of your web page. They can be used for
many different things, but we will cover their use in search engines.
There are 3 primary tags that are suggested for every page you make.
1. The Title Tag
----------------
The <title> tag serves a couple of purposes. First, it is the name of your
page(or the content that is found on it). The text you enter in the <title>
tag will be displayed along the top bar of any browser, and is also used as
the text for "Favorites" or "bookmarks" when someone adds your page to
their list of most visited sites.
The <title> tag is also searched by many top search engines (such as
Google) for words that are relevant to your page. That's why it is
important to add words which are relevant to your page.
2. The Description Tag
----------------------
The <meta name ="description"> is also one of the most frequently used tags
of search engines. This tag allows you to give a brief description of your
page so that search engines can get an idea of what's on your page without
reading the entire site. In addition to using them for finding out about
you, search engines often return this information to the person searching,
so that they can decide for themselves if it is relevant or not. Here's an
example from AltaVista:
The second and third line of the return are directly from the Meta
Description Tag. It's important to build a description tag that is clear,
to the point, full of good keywords that describe your site, and short.
Although it is disputed how many characters are actually accepted, there is
a maximum of 255 characters that are accepted. Often search engines accept
less, so it's a good idea to design a description tag that gets the point
across, but isn't too complicated. Generally, one sentence is a good idea.
The description tag above is a great example.
So you want to make your own? Here's what one would look like:
<meta name="description" content="Free Web E-mail is a free service
designed to access your electronic mail from anywhere on the web!">
By inserting a high quality meta tag like this at the top of your HTML,
you'll increase your chances of being found in the search engines before
your competitors.
3. The Keywords Tag
-------------------
The <meta name ="keywords"> may separate you from your competitors. Perhaps
the most important tag, the keywords meta tag is the tag that gives you the
ability to add a list of "keywords"(words that describe what can be found
on your page) to your site. Search engines automatically "spider" through
these, deciding if what someone is searching for can really be found on
your page.
Many webmasters try to "Spam" their keywords by listing hundreds of
keywords in their meta tags, many times listing words that aren't even
relevant. This tactic is frowned upon by search engines, and can get you
permanently banned from being listed with them. Because of that, it's a
good idea to never repeat a word more than 3 times in your meta tags. For
example "Christian wallpaper, Christian, E-mail, and Christian Articles"
would be the maximum time you would want to use the word "Christian."
It's also a good idea to choose a few keywords that are relevant to your
site, and stick to those. Some say that you can enter up to 1,000
characters for your keywords list, but the experts highly suggest that you
use just use a few words. Trying to include every word that is relevant to
your site is just too hard. Hand pick a few, and you'll be surprised how
well it can work.
Here's an example keywords tag from Heartlight Magazine
(http://www.heartlight.org):
<meta name="keywords" content="Heartlight, Christian, living, positive,
encouragement, inspiration, scripture, study, comfort, caring, ezine,
magazine, love, Bible, Jesus">
http://www.heartlight.org
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