Building Your Own Meta Tags

Although there are several uses for Meta tags, this page will focus on the tags that will help your web page to be indexed properly by search engines that support the meta tag. Submitting your web page to a search engine without using meta tags is overlooking an important part of the page making process. Of the 7 major search engines, 3 use meta tags to determine page ranking.

Those 3 are:

Alta Vista
Hotbot
Infoseek

There are both "positives" and "negatives" about the use of meta tags. Though some search engines read and use meta tags, others do not and the information indexed is actually read by the search engine "bot" from within the page title and the body of the document. The two meta tags used to contain the information to be indexed are discussed below:

<META name="description" content="Enter a description here"> A search engine that can pick up the keywords in your site also can use this area to put in its description area. The description attribute is suggested to be approximately 20-25 words (150-250 characters): content= "This site is an HTML help site for using meta tags." could be a description for this page. <META name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"> This tag tells search engines what keywords are present in your page, instead of just looking at the title of your page. These are added to the keywords found in the document itself. Also, some of these engines have blockers that if you include too many of the same keywords it will disregard your page: content="html, meta, help, building" is an example of keywords that this page might use. After making your Meta Tags place them in the HEAD of the document between the <head> and </head> tags below the </title> tag. There are other Meta Tags which contain other information but these contain the information used for page indexing by the search engines. For more information see an Advanced HTML Tutorial.

Is Your Site Search Engine Ready?

After installing your META tags you can "check" your site for Search Engine readiness by using this Web Site Garage link.


Site Description
(more descriptive the better)
Between 5 words and 1000 characters
(separated with a space and a comma)
Here is your META - tag coding.
Put it in the HEAD of your HTML document.

Main HTML Help

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