| META
TAGS |
| What are meta tags? They
are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages.
Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area
of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead,
meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a
human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell
a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has
self-rated itself in terms of adult content. Let's see two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth: |
EXAMPLE |
| <HEAD> <TITLE>YOUR SITE TITLE HERE</TITLE> <META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="A short description about your site would go here."> <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Descriptive,Words,Seperated,By,Commas, Would,Be,Placed,Here"> </HEAD> |
| In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page's "HEAD" area as noted by the <HEAD> tag -- it ends at the portion shown as </HEAD>. Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a <TITLE> tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, and then a META KEYWORDS tag. Let's talk about what these do. |
| THE
TITLE TAG |
| The HTML title tag isn't
really a meta tag, but it's worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever
text you place in the title tag (between the <TITLE> and </TITLE>
portions as shown in the example) will appear in the reverse bar of someone's
browser when they view the web page. For instance, within the title tag
of this page that you are reading is this text: < [======] .:Trend Designz:. [======] > The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists. In a web directories listing, the contents of your title tag, is also what appears as the name of your site when being searched for. |
THE
META DESCRIPTION TAG |
| Look
back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one
that says "name=description"? That's the meta description tag. The text
you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks
after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters
may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).
For this page you are reading, I would like it described in a search engine's
listings like this: My personal webpage filled with tons of free high quality premade website layouts, step-by-step tutorials, easy to use javascripts, for you to save or download onto your computer. Using the META DESCRIPTION TAG gives you some degree of control with various directories. Google however ignores the meta description tag. But overall it's worth the effort to use. |
|
THE META KEYWORD TAG |
| The meta keywords tag allows you to provide
additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your
body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn't.
That's because most crawlers now ignore the tag. The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for ON THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT. For instance, if you had a page about a Anime or Manga Series-- AND you say the words Anime or Manga at various places in your body copy -- then mentioning the words "Anime" or "Manga" in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words. Remember, if you don't use the words "Anime" or "Manga" on the page at all, then just adding them to the meta keywords tag is extremely unlikely to help the page do well for the term. The text in the meta keywords tag, FOR THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT, works in conjunction with the text in your body copy. The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don't appear on the page itself. For instance, let's say you had a page all about the Japanesse Anime Series "Sailor Moon". You never actually say the words "Japanesse" on this page. By having the word in your meta keywords tag, then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for "Japanesse Anime Series Sailor Moon". Of course you would greater increase the odds if you just used the word "collecting" in the body copy of the page itself. |
| Using All capital leters might help. Far too many people new to search engine optimization obsess with the meta keywords tag. FEW crawlers support it. For those that do, it MIGHT! MAYBE! PERHAPS! POSSIBLY! BUT WITH NO GUARANTEE! help improve the ranking of your page. It also may very well do nothing for your page at all. In fact, repeat a particular word too often in a meta keywords tag and you could actually harm your page's chances of ranking well. Because of this, I strongly suggest that those new to search engine optimization not even worry about the tag at all. |
|
META ROBOTS TAG |
| One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag. This lets you specify that a particular page should NOT be indexed by a search engine. To keep spiders out, simply add this text between your head tags on each page you don't want indexed. The format is shown below: |
|
EXAMPLE |
| <HEAD> <TITLE>YOUR SITE TITLE</TITLE> <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> </HEAD> |
| You do NOT need to use variations of the
meta robots tag to help your pages get indexed. They are unnecessary. By
default, a crawler will try to index all your web pages and will try to
follow links from one page to another. Most major search engines support the meta robots tag. However, the robots.txt convention of blocking indexing is more efficient, as you don't need to add tags to each and every page. The meta robots tag also has some extensions offered by particular search engines to prevent indexing of multimedia content. |
IN CONCLUSION |
| Overall, just remember this. Of all the
meta tags you may see out there: Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed. Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using. Meta Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn't worth the time to implement. Meta Everything Else: Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines. |