Hopefully I will be able to show you how to use meta tags in the HEAD portion of your Web page to help some search spiders index your site better.
If you don't use meta tags, spiders index a page based on the first few hundred characters in your HTML file.
Search Spider
A program that automatically crawls over the web, creating an index of all accessible pages in cyberspace. This index is a listing of all the content the search service knows about. Then directories are compiled to organize the sites. Not all Search Engines use spiders, the following do: Alta Vista, WebCrawler, HotBot.
A Little About Search Engines and the use of Meta Tags.
AltaVista
AltaVista spiders index both keywords and description meta tags. If you've used a description meta tag it will be displayed as the summary for your URL in the search results. You should include meta tags for framed pages as well.
Excite
Does not support meta tags for indexing, instead their software automatically generates a description of the page based upon the words in your HTML file. It cannot handle framed pages unless the page also includes a no-frames section.
HotBot
HotBot is a full-web index and search service that claims to support more meta tag names than any other service. They support description, keywords, author meta tags.
Infoseek
Infoseek is a directory and search service and has claimed to have an index of over 50 million URLs. They support keyword and description meta tags in your HTML pages.
Open Text
Open Text relies on full-text indexing and automatically creates search summary text based on the first 200 words on the page. They do not use meta tags at all!
WebCrawler
WebCrawler was the first full-text search engine on the Internet back in 1994. They do not support indexing meta tags, so you better have a very informative and useful title to your page!
Yahoo!
Yahoo does not use spiders to index the content of their site, they use 'humans'! To be included in Yahoo!, you must submit your site, along with a 20-word description of its content. You can recommend the category to which it should belong, but final decisions on both inclusion and placement are in their hands. Yahoo doesn't care about meta tags, they'll just ignore them.
So what's a META tag? And, how do I use it?
A basic meta tag looks like this:
<META NAME="________" CONTENT="__________">
•The tag's name is META
•The first switch is NAME. This switch is used to store a set of information and the most common values are DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS.
•The second switch is CONTENT, it tells the browser what data is stored in the meta tag.
So the content switch is the actual data that is stored in the meta tag.
Ideally, search spiders will describe your page just the way you want it described. Ultimately, display the search results high up on its hit list for the users requested search.
The basic stucture of a Description meta tag.
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="a short, but appealing, description of the page, usually less than 200-250 characters long.">
The basic stucture of a Keywords meta tag.
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENTS="words, simple phrases, items of interest, possible search terms">
Don't forget, the meta tags live in the <HEAD> portion of your Web page, before the <BODY> tag. Otherwise it could be overlooked by the search spider. If you make a mistake or use a meta tag not supported by the search service, they'll just ignore it and go on with the work at hand. There are more tags than I have listed, but these are good for a start. Any good HTML book will inform you about meta tags. I'll have more "White Papers" on the subject soon.