Dick's Meta Tags Part 1
|
|
|
|
Welcome all new and past subscribers to my
newsletter.
This issue, Meta Tags (Or how to hope you get listed) I noticed a few months ago that my visitors per day had fallen off. I wondered what had happened, so the first thing I checked was a search for my site in the major search engines. To my surprise, about half of the engines had dropped my site from their listings! I didn't know what had happened, so I decided to learn more about search engines and how they operate, and hopefully along the way find out why I disappeared from their listings. I have learned a lot of new things, one of which is that even though you get listed once in a search engine, you will probably not stay there unless you routinely resubmit. When I first started my site, I went to all the search engines and submitted my site, and waited and waited and waited. Finally about 2 months later I showed up in Alta Vista. And about 4 months after that I turned up in Yahoo. As you can see my first time took a while. This second time, after adding what should be the right Meta Tag information, it took about 2 months for most of them to re-find me and list me. I hope you can see from my example the value of Meta Tag information. Even though not all search engines use them, (most do), they still have to be there. First let's get the easy search engine out of the way and that is Yahoo. It is the easiest, and probably takes the longest. All of their submissions are supposed to be looked at by human beings, and any adjustments made in the placement of your site will be made by them. They also add some of the comments that you see next to their listings. Yahoo will use the <Title> Tag, so before you submit to them let's get that one right. The <Title> tag is simple. If you use web page software, like I do, to build you page, if your not careful it will assign a title to your page something like "New Page 1". That's not good enough. We need a title that can describe our site in a few words. If you will right click on this page and then left click on "View Source" you'll see all the code it takes to make this page. Up at the top you'll see "<title>Dick's Meta Tags Part 1</title>" That's the title that I have given this page. If this page should happen to show up in a search engine, that would be the title that is displayed. Also if you would bookmark this page, that is the title that would show up in your list of favorites. To put a <Title > tag in you page, go to the top of your HTML and find a line that starts with "<head>". (Make sure that there isn't a <title> tag already there, if there is just change the inside title part). Go to the end of that line and hit return to put a new line in. Type, <title>Your Page Title</title> Where "Your Page Title" is the title of your site. It doesn't hurt to add a short line after that to further describe your site. My title of my first page is, <title>Dick's Web Design Workshop Learn about web design</title>
Remember, whatever you put here will show up in all the search engines as your
title, and most have some extra room, so if you can keep it short, put a little
descriptive line there to attract your visitors eye, and also give them a little
idea what they will find at your site. If your happy with your changes, lets go on to page two.
|
Free Web Tools! ______________________ 
|
|
|