META Tagging for Search Engines
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We describe the use of the META tag for specifying to search
engines how you would like your document to be indexed.
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There are now some 100 million publicly available web pages, I
understand. Not even the most ardent surfer is going to visit all
those, or even a fraction, and discover your wonderful little corner.
You can advertise your presence, for free or for fee. You could have
your URL tattoed in big letters on your body and then run naked across
the White House lawn. Make sure the media is there and can get a good
view.. Personally, I prefer to understand how search engines work, how
to select and use keywords, etc.
You will need to study search techniques before you can optimize for them.
The very least you should be familiar with is
Alta Vista: Help for Simple Query.
You will also need to understand how to construct an
HTML Head with
META tags,
to declare keywords and a description, to be used by
search engines.
See the source of this page for example.
The META tag: Controlling how your Web page is indexed by AltaVista:
In the absence of any other information, Alta Vista and some other
search engines, will index all words in your document (except for
comments), and will use the first few words (e.g. 250 characters)
as a short abstract to serve back.
It is possible for you to control how your page is indexed by using
the
META tag
to specify additional keywords to index, and a short abstract.
This tag can be used to augment documents with 'meta' information that
is not normally displayed by browsers.
It provides document authors with a
mechanism for identifying information that should be included in the
response headers for an HTTP request.
The markup is stored as attributes
of the META tag and is not displayed when the document is loaded into a
browser.
However it can be extracted by servers and clients for use in
identifying, indexing, and cataloging documents.
Here is an example
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>The Web Developer's Virtual Library
</TITLE>
<META NAME = "Keywords" CONTENT="
HTML, CGI, Java, VRML, browsers, plugins,
graphics, HTTP servers, JavaScript, Perl,
ActiveX, Shockwave">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="
Locate web authoring and software Internet
resources at The WDVL, a well-organised
goldmine with over 500 pages and thousands
of links about HTML, CGI, Java, VRML,
browsers, plugins, graphics, HTTP servers,
JavaScript, Perl, ActiveX, Shockwave,..">
</HEAD>
Use acronyms and spell them out.
In general, you will only use a very large number of keywords on the
index page of a large site.
Do not include spurious irrelevant keywords - you might attract extra
visitors who would not otherwise have come, but they might not thank
you for it. If I added 'sex' to the above list I could expect both my
traffic and my hate mail to increase dramatically..
One FAQ is:
would the various search engines (like Infoseek, Alta Vista, etc.)
that normally enter ALL the Web page text into their database,
would they just enter the "keywords" from the meta tag in place of the
HTML body text on the page. Or do they include all the regular HTML
text visible on the Web page PLUS the meta tag "keywords"?
According to
Infoseek's
Using META Tags to Define Index Terms for Your Page,
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.
<!-- This is a comment -->
The META tag keyword field can be used to specify additional key words
or synonyms that describe the contents of a site. META tag keywords
are used in the indexing process but will not display on your Web page.
The keywords can include up to 1000 characters of text.
Be sure that the key words chosen are relevant to the contents
of the page.
Infoseek Guide indexes your entire page (except any text within
comments), regardless of whether or not you include a
description or keywords in the tags. The words in the tags are indexed
in addition to the rest of the document.
According to
Alta Vista,
it is possible for you to control how your page is indexed by
using the META tag to specify additional keywords to index, and a
short abstract.
Both of them say 'additional', i.e. using the META tag supplies extra
keywords, they do not inhibit the search for keywords in the text.
Note that the same cannot be true for the abstract served back to the
user - if you supply a description in META then this is what the user
will see. You should do this if for some reason you don't have a
descriptive paragraph at the start of your document, e.g. you really
believe 1 GIF = 1Kwords. If you do have a descriptive paragraph at the
start of your document (recommended) then better to omit the META
description because you will forget to update one of the duplicates..
I used these tags on all my pages long before AV and ISG existed; they
were necessary for
Aliweb,
and at the time this was all so experimental I only put
'Web Developers Virtual Lib.' in the description. It took me a while
to realize the experimental period was over and everybody searching for
HTML, CGI etc was only getting that terse abstract..
Not all engines use META; e.g.
Excite says:-
Our spider doesn't honor meta tags. We believe our decision
protects our users from unreliable information.
So the best advice seems to be, work very hard on selecting your
keywords (e.g. use a thesaurus to find other words people might use;
brainstorm with friends and colleagues, etc) and put the most
important ones into a carefully crafted paragraph at the start of your
HTML document. Put the whole list into a META tag, most important or
selective words first. Announce your page or site using one of the
multiple submission services such as Entity. Keep your clothes on.
The FAQ goes on to ask:
Also, does anyone know whether the text within "Comments" tags and
"Alt" tags are entered into search engine databases?
The ISG goes on to say
"Infoseek Guide 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."
So, comments are ignored, ALT text is not.
- The HTML Meta tag.
-
How To Use Meta Tags, from
Search Engine Watch.
- The
META Tag Builder is a fill-in form that will build an HTML header
with appropriate META tags.
These tags allow better indexing by robot-driven search engines,
such as
AltaVista,
Infoseek.
- PICS
is an infrastructure for associating labels (metadata) with
Internet content. It was originally designed to help parents and
teachers control what children access on the Internet, but it also
facilitates other uses for labels, including code signing,
privacy, and intellectual property rights management.
To generate PICS META tags
for adult content see the
RSAC or
SafeSurf
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