Your page is up, and you're ready to receive VISITORS, but you're not quite sure how to go about doing it. Aside from the wonderful promotions and attention-getters available to you from GeoCities, you can use META TAGS to make your page easier to locate.
Coding Your Page
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language is the language used on the internet. It is basically just a way of using tags to tell a Web Browser how to display information, such as text, graphics, tables, and forms.
Titles
The <TITLE> tag appears at the top of your HTML document, and at the top of your browser when the page is displayed. By viewing the document source for this page, you will see the following information at the top of the page:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Meta Tags</TITLE>
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Betty Wills">
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="User-Agent: Mozilla/3.02Gold (Macintosh;
I; PPC)">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Meta Tag Help">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="meta tag, html help, RainForest, spider,
search engine">
</HEAD>
The <TITLE> tag serves an important function as far as labeling and categorizing your site for some of the search engines on the internet. It also effects how your site will appear in the list that is generated after a search brings up your page.
Meta Tags
In the above example, the <META> Tags, "Author" and "GENERATOR", were automatically included in the HEAD by Netscape Gold v3.02, a popular browser which includes a very nice and easy to use HTML editor. The <META> Tags, "Description" and "Keywords" were added manually, and here is the reason why.....
<META> Tags control how your Web page is indexed by search engines. When you submit your URL to the various search engines, they customarily send out an automated query, or "spider" which gathers information, and indexes the millions of pages that are published on the internet each day. The "spider" looks for a META "Description" and "Keywords" in the HEAD portion of your HTML document.
Using this HTML document as an example, search engines will customarily index both fields ("Description" and "Keywords") as words so that a search using either "MetaTags", or "HTML" as the keywords will result in a match. The "Description" and URL will be included with the list generated by the search engine. If the spider does not find a <META> "Description" in the HEAD, it will index all words in your document, and will use the first few words of the document as a short abstract.
It is wise to include words in your <META> Tags that you would expect people to use when trying to locate your site. You should also make it a point to use all lower case to avoid the *exact* match requirements that come with the use of upper case keywords.
After your documents have been completed, and the <META> Tags are in place, you are ready to submit your URL to the primary search engines. Submit-It offers a free service for submitting your URL to some 20 different search engines and catalogs. However, if you would rather focus on the 4 major search engines, they are as follows:
* Alta Vista
* InfoSeek
* Lycos
* WebCrawler
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