Metatags

 

Updated on  06/24/01

Note from Mike

This is how search engines find your website on the internet. So if you want other people to see your site its important to include these in your html. Description below taken from askjeeves.com.




Meta Tags - What are they?
a. Meta tags are a non-displaying (hidden) HTML tags which provide site owners with some degree of control over how their web pages are indexed by "spider" or "robot" search engines. Properly formatted and well composed meta tags can increase the relevancy of a web page when searches are performed at a number of very popular engines. Search engines which index Meta Tag information include: AltaVista, HotBot, Infoseek and WebCrawler.

 

There are two Meta Tags which relate to search engine indexing and relevancy:

  <META NAME="Description" Content="Your web page description">

  <META NAME="Keywords" Content="Your web page keywords">

The Meta Description tag should contain a concise description of your page and the services or information it features. If you're lucky, the contents of your description Meta tag will be associated with your URL if it comes up in search engine results. Without it, your web page description will be left up to the whim of spiders which seem to prefer generating garbled, illegible and inappropriate HTML code as a summary of your page. We recommend that you keep your description under 20 words. If it's too long it will simply be truncated.

The Meta Keywords tag is intended to contain keywords or key phrases that you think people potentially interested in your site might be searching for at the engines. Each word or phrase should be separated by a comma followed by a single space. Some word repetition is permissible but don't push your luck - many engines are actually penalizing sites which overuse keywords. Excessive keyword repetition, known as "spamming", can result in your pages getting lower relevancy to searches, or being banned from the search engine altogether (if you really go too far). For fairly obvious reasons, it is not in the best interest of the engine to allow such spamming to go unchecked.

 

Placement of the Meta Tags within your HTML
Both Meta Tags should be inserted within the <HEAD> element of your HTML (as illustrated in the example below). Although it is not necessary to include both Meta Tags, we recommend that you do.