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Web Tech |
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Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
All About The Proper Use Of META TAGS
by
Designing Online, Inc.
The unseen Meta-Tags are as important to your web page as anything your customers can see, because the bottom line is that if you don't use Meta-Tags or don't use them properly, your customers might never have the opportunity to find your website in the first place.
Getting the Best Search Engine Indexing:
The optimum appearance of the beginning of your web pages will look something like the image to your right:
Let's take a look at what and why these tags are the way they are and then you can use the Meta-Tag generator to help you create your own tags if
necessary.
Click the link below and enter your URL. This program will take your current Meta-Tags and Analyze them for performance.
Meta-tag Analyzer
META tags have two possible attributes:
- <META HTTP-EQUIV="name" CONTENT="content">
- <META NAME="name" CONTENT="content">
META tags should be placed in the head of the HTML document, between
the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags (especially important in documents using FRAMES).
Controls Web robots on a per-page basis. E.g.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
Robots may traverse this page but not index it.
- INDEX allows the page to be indexed by the spider
- NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed.
- FOLLOW allows all links on the page to be spidered as well
- NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and
indexing the linked pages.
- ALL is the same as INDEX,FOLLOW
- NONE is the same as NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW
- NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the
text on the page can still be indexed.
- NOIMAGECLICK prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead
there will only be a link to the page.
Keywords used by search engines to index your document in addition to words from the title and document body. E.g.
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="fresh oranges, cool autumn scent, living room furniture">
- Think KeyPhrases instead of keywords. Key Phrases will provide you with a much greater volume of internet response.
- The primary words that appear in your title and description should also appear in your keywords, plus the primary words and phrases used on the page. Also, the primary words in your title and description should also appear somewhere else on your page.
- Insert your pages keywords into at least 1 of your images ALT tags. This helps for those search engines that read these tags, but don't overdo it.
- It is best if you keep the number of keywords, commas and spaces below 800 characters.
- Many search engines only index the first 10 to 20 keywords, so be sure to have the most relevant keywords and phrases listed first.
- Using the same word more than three times, even if used differently within a phrase, might be considered Spamdexing by the search engine and your page might not be included.
A short, plain language description of the document. Used by search engines
to describe your document. Particularly important if your document has very
little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts at the top. E.g.
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Citrus fruit wholesaler in Northern California. 40 varieties of mixed fruit drinks and wines available 24/7">
Keep your description below 250 characters.
Other Useful Meta-Tags:
Controls caching in HTTP/1.0. Value must be "no-cache". Issued by browsers
during a Reload request, and in a document prevents Netscape Navigator
caching a page locally.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
If you change the content on a page daily, this will force the visiting
browser to ignore the images and text they saved in visitors cache (computer
memory files) and will force the browser to reload your page from the
beginning.
Specifies a delay in seconds before the browser automatically reloads the
document. Optionally, specifies an alternative URL to load. E.g.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="3;URL=http://www.some.org/some.html">
This works very well when placed on a page you are not going to use anymore. Instead of just deleting the page and having people get a blank screen when finding it through the search engines or a link, you can tell the page to forward to whatever page you want. Eventually, the search engines that re-index your site, will drop this page from their listings because it is being forwarded.
Typically the unqualified author's name.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Author" CONTENT="John H. Smith">
Typically an unqualified copyright statement.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Copyright" CONTENT="Copyright 1999-2003 John H. Smith,
Inc. All Rights Reserved ">
See also,
Meta-Tag Generator
For more detailed Meta Tag information, see
The Dictionary of HTML META Tags
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This article Copyright ©2005 - Designing Online, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.
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