Meta-Tags

If you want to submit your site to search engines, then you are going to have to learn about Meta Tags. Huh? Yes, I said Meta Tags. These are tags in HTML which tell a search engine information about your web page.

The example below shows the Meta Tags for this page. Note that all Meta Tags are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags at the top of your HTML document.

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="metatags,meta-tags,searching,
search engines,optimizing searches,keywords,site description">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Be sure and set up your meta-tags 
properly if you want to be found by some search engines.">
<META name="copyright" content="Copyright (c) 1999 Richard Lowe, All Rights Reserved">
<META NAME="author" content="Richard G. Lowe, Jr.">

The most important tags are "keywords" and "description". Keywords tells the search engines which keywords will index to your site. You can specify up to 1024 characters of keywords. Be careful not to duplicate too often as some search engines will downgrade or delete as this is a characteristic of spammers.

The description tag is used by the search engine to display a description of your page when it is printed out.

The other tags (in the example above "copyright" and "author" just provide additional data. There are other tags as well, and all of them serve useful purposes.

Some search engines will improve your rating if keywords are contained in the text of the page, the title and the description. Thus it is a good idea to make sure all of these elements are consistent and well done.

A well designed set of meta-tags can improve your site's chances of being hit by several hundred percent. So this is worth doing well.

Some Good Design Tips Here are a few tips to help create a better web site.
Contingency Design Be sure and help your visitors, even if they do something wrong. Handle misspellings and errors to get them back on track.
First Things First Before you write one word of HTML code, even before you start your analysis, you must define your purpose.
Who Is Your Audience? Before doing much of anything, you need to understand the group with whom you are communicating. By doing this, you will make your job many times easier.
What Do You Want To Communicate? Once you know who you are talking to, you should take some time to figure out what you want to say.
How Do You Want To Communicate? Now it's time to decide what methods you want to use to communicate your message.
Why Are You Creating A Site? It's important to know why you are creating a web site so you know when you are hitting your target.
How To Get Around Your visitors are more likely to look at your whole site if your navigation scheme is logical and easy to use.
Pulling Them In Deeper You want people to stay for as long as possible on your site. How do you do this? Great content and lots of cross linking.
Put ALT tags on all of your graphics Be sure to include descriptive ALT tags on every image. Many search engines use this data. In addition, this makes your pages better for people who surf without graphics turned on.
Meta-Tags Be sure and set up your meta-tags properly if you want to be found by some search engines. (See also HTML tag reference guide - <META>)

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