Many writers these days maintain their own Web site. In the last issue we talked about HTML and a few basics you need to know about how it displays Web pages. This issue we’ll look at the hidden parts of a Web page, parts that most people never see but that are very important if you’re a writer who wants visitors to find your page. You can pay a professional to set this up or you can easily do it yourself.
If you look at the source HTML of any Web page, you’ll see the <head> tag way up at the top. Scroll down and you'll see the <title> tag. The text inside <title> is exactly what a search engine will display when it gives people the option of going to your page. Because the title may be the only thing someone bothers to read, It’s important that your title be clear and straightforward so that busy people skimming a long list of titles can quickly figure out what your site is about.
The title is not the place to be cute. For example, a cryptic title that only your most ardent fans will understand may give them a chuckle, but someone who doesn’t know you or your work won’t understand the reference and will probably never visit your site. It's best to stick with an unambiguous title like, "Jim Bob McMilllan’s Home Page" or "The Texas Writer’s League".
A good title is valuable, but it’s limited. For example, a Web surfer might wonder, what exactly is the Texas Writer’s League? What would I find if I went there?
This is where metatags come in. Metatags are clumps of information that are designed to explain your site to browsers and search engines. There are several different metatags, but the two types that you need to know about are Description and Keywords.
The Description metatag is a text description of the contents of a site. If someone who is using a search engine accidentally stumbled onto the Texas Writer’s League while using a search engine, they would see something like this under the title:
"Serving writers of poetry, fiction, humor, non-fiction, screenplays, technical, business, academic, juvenile, children, history, biography…"
The HTML that creates this metatag looks like this:
<meta name="description" content="Serving writers of poetry, fiction, humor, non-fiction, screenplays, technical, business, academic, juvenile, children, history, biography…">
How you want to describe your home page is up to you, but I suggest that, like the title, simple and clear is best. Strangers are more likely to respond to a short description than one that tries to cover all possibilities. If you really want a 12-page tract about your struggles as a writer, don't put it in the Description metatag.
The other metatag you need to understand is Keywords. This is simply an index listing of key words that search engines might look for. If a searcher out on the Internet types the word "penguin" into a search engine and you have the word "penguins" in your Keywords metatag, the search engine will pull the Title and Description of your page and display them to that searcher.
Unlike the Description and Title metatags, brevity is not a virtue in the Keywords metatag and you may want to include every word you can think of that might apply to your page. Here’s how the Writer’s League Keywords metatag begins:
<meta name="keywords" content="writers, poets, writers organizations, publishing, book publishing, magazine publishing, self publishing, agents, editors…">
If someone is searching for the word "publishing", a search engine will display the Writer's League site high up in its index list because that word appears several times in the Keywords metatag. Unscrupulous sales types will often fill their Keywords metatag with a repeated popular search word, like MP3, MP3, MP3, and so on, in hopes of being the first option displayed on a search engine's list if that word is the selected keyword.
If you already have a Web site but it doesn’t have any metatags, it’s easy to create them. Just open a site that does have metatags, like the Writer’s League home page, use the View Source option on your browser and copy the Description and Keywords metatags. Paste them into your page somewhere between start <head> and stop </head>, then replace the description and keywords text with your own. Make sure that every start bracket (<) has a matching stop bracket (>), and that all the display text is surrounded by quotes. If you need to, you can print the source code of your Web page model and use it as a guide to make certain that your metatags are in the right place and have all the right parts.