Do
you believe that drek? Believe it or not, that is the message that is
being given out on a lot of the web sites about promotion, and in
books on the shelf at the book store. Meta tags are not magic. They
are, however, an essential part of a well designed web site promotion
program. So, let's look at how they work and how to put them to work
for your site.
To
figure all of this out, let's construct an example and look at each
piece of it. Lets run over to Alta Vista and look for a frog site....
Foley:
Add sounds of stampede here.
OK.
Here we are at Alta Vista. I've searched for 'frogs' and on page 6 of
the response I found this entry:
Isn't
that informative? After looking through 6 pages of listings for frogs,
would you run over to this site? The person that spent his or her hard
earned spare time to build this page should get a better reward for
all of that hard work.
What
went wrong here? Obviously, the search engine took the first stuff it
found that looked like text instead of HTML. It did the best it could
with really limited information. The author of the page just didn't
construct the page to be indexed by search engines. Let's fix it a
piece at a time.
The
title isn't bad. It does give some information. But it could be
better. Remember, most search engines give more weight to words found
in the TITLE, especially if those words are also found in the body of
the text. So, a better TITLE might be: "Pet Exotic Frogs For
Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas caerulea" This is much more
informative and likely to generate more solid keywords in the search
engines. Especially if we refer to these same words in the body of the
page (or in our other heading sections.) Here's what we have so far:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea</TITLE>
Now,
let's give the search engines that don't use meta tags some copy to
look at that we want used in the description. We do this by placing a
short comment into the page after the TITLE tag. Now our page looks
like this:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea</TITLE>
<!-- Best prices on pet exotic frogs anywhere on the internet.
These White's Tree Frogs can be shipped overnight to arrive healthy
and happy. Order online today. -->
This
takes us to your first meta tag: Description. We now give the search
engines that use meta tags the description of the page that we want to
have displayed when our page comes up in a search. Don't make it too
long, as the engines will only give a limited amount of text.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea</TITLE>
<!-- Best prices on pet exotic frogs anywhere on the internet.
These White's Tree Frogs can be shipped overnight to arrive healthy
and happy. Order online today. -->
<META Name="description" Content="Best prices on pet
exotic frogs anywhere on the internet. These White's Tree Frogs can be
shipped overnight to arrive healthy and happy. Order online
today.">
Now
we have told the engines what to say about our site, but we still want
to tell them what keywords we would like to be found under. Please DON'T
put keywords in here just to get traffic. Imagine that you are running
a restaurant. Your sign outside can bring in lots of look-e-loos, but
if they don't buy, they just get in the way. They take up time and
space that could be used to take better care of your real customers.
Measure your success by sales (or whatever is relevant to your site)
and not by pounds of visitors you con into coming to your site.
Now
our entry in the Alta Vista results should look something like this:
Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea
Best prices on pet exotic frogs anywhere on the internet. These
White's Tree Frogs can be shipped overnight to arrive healthy and
happy. Order online today
http://www.herp.com/pet/frog.html
- size 1628 bytes - 11 Feb 97
We
have now built a good heading for our page that will give better
information to any search engine that stops in to look us over. We
have given our search words, a short description, put good search
words in the title. Things are looking pretty good. Now we should have
a better chance of being indexed correctly, and we haven't Spammed. We
haven't overloaded our page with keyword repetitions that could get us
penalized. And even the engines that stop short on a page will find
us.
Oh,
didn't I mention that some of the robots and spiders stop when they
run into certain things on a page. Some stop when they run into a JAVA
applet. Building a good header like the one above means the spider
will have found enough information ahead of the applet to give you a
meaningful entry.
But,
which search engines will this help with? Let's take a look:
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