USING META TAGS

 

Preparing and submitting your site to the search engines is one of the jobs we all love to hate. Graphic designers enjoy doing the pretty pictures, programmers enjoy any new coding challenges that they might face, techies enjoy complaining that they can't view anything while browsing with Netscape 0.01 on Linux with images and JavaScript disabled.

When it comes to submitting the site to the search engines we are all agreed on one thing - let the trainee do it:) just kidding. It's boring and it's time consuming but it's worth putting in the effort if you want people to visit your site.

There are few stages you must go through before you even think about visiting a search engine to submit your site. The first is metatagging. Meta tags are not visible on the page except for the title tag (yes, the title tag is a meta tag). Meta tags are used by most search engines to help index and rank your site. Meta tags are often used to display search engine results, so choose them carefully.

Below is an example of the minimum meta tag information you should have in every page:
 

<head>
<!-- start meta tag code -->
<title>Stomping Grounds</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 (Western Europe)">
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="cache">
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
<meta name="audience" content="all">
<meta name="author" content="What is your name?">
<meta name="copyright" content="2003-2004">
<meta name="publisher" content="What did you use to build your site?">
<meta name="robots" content="follow">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="10">
<meta name="description" content="Insert a description of your site here,">
<meta name="keywords" content="insert, keywords, here, seperated, by , comma's">
</head>

Make sure that you use keywords that appear in the body of your page and that your description actually describes what your page is about.

Now lets explain exactly what each of these fields mean.

Title : Always enter a descriptive title for your page. Even if the page is contained within a frameset and the title is hidden, the page title is still indexed by the search engines and will avoid the dreaded 'Untitled' heading appearing in the search engine listings.

Audience : Choose a category from the dropdown list that best describes the audience your page is aimed at.

Author : Copyright : and Publisher : It's quite obvious what you enter here.

Revisit After : Will make sure that the robots return to index your site.

Robots : This requires a bit more info so here goes
Options - INDEX, NOINDEX, FOLLOW, NOFOLLOW
INDEX: means that robots are welcome to include this page in search services.
FOLLOW: means that robots are welcome to follow links from this page to find other pages.
NOFOLLOW: allows the page to be indexed, but no links from the page are explored.
NOINDEX: allows the links from this page to be explored - this page however is not indexed.
So choose what you want the robot to do when it stumbles upon your site by selecting an option from the dropdown list.

Image Tool Bar : This gives you the ability to remove the IE Save Image bar that appears when you hover over certain images on a WebPages.

Smart Tags : Microsoft has introduced something called smart tags to new releases of Internet Explorer - basically this means that they hijack your WebPages content looking for keywords that they can turn into links that take people away from your site to theirs.

Let's take a look at this line of text as intended to be viewed by the author
I like to surf in the rough seas near Edinburgh.

Now lets look at what could possibly appear (just an example)
I like to surf in the rough seas near Edinburgh.

The word surf might take you to the IE homepage. The word Edinburgh might become a link to Encarta.

As a developer I want control over what links appear on my site. I'm not saying that smart tags are a bad thing but I should be able to choose if I want them to appear on my WebPages. Unfortunately Microsoft have decided that the smart tags are enabled as default - if you don't want smart tags you have to opt out.

So, if you want the smart tags to appear on your site then tick the box (opt in) if you don't want smart tags then leave the box unticked :) that's how it should have been done in the first place

Description : Make sure that you edit the content here to represent what this page is all about.

Keywords : Try to think what someone might type into a search engine if they are trying to find what you have to offer. Make sure your keywords are relevant to your site, people will leave as soon as they arrive if you have misled them.

 

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