META Tags and Search Engines
META Tags and Search Engines
Before posting or submitting pages to search engines, indexes and directories using robots, follow this short guide to achieve the desired result:
Before submitting your site, please check the following:
* Web Page Title - The title of your web page is the text that appears between the HTML
tags. The search results display this title when your web page is listed.
<br /> * Web Page Description - The web page description is the first 200 characters after the HTML <BODY> tag that appear on your web page. The search results display these words when your web page is listed.
<br /> Therefore, these words should accurately describe the intent of your web page.
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<br />When you submit your web page URL, it will be added to the World Wide Web the next time the index of the respective search engine is updated. Note: It can take up to several weeks until this update is made ... thus, don’t be in a hurry if your page doesn’t appear at once in the listings. Once the update is made users can search for your page from the World Wide Web on the home page of the respective search engine.
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<br />Note: Some commercial Internet Service Providers may use a robots.txt file to prevent web robots from indexing their users’ web pages. You can check to see if a server has a robots.txt file by entering your domain name/robots.txt in the Go To or Location box of your browser, for example
<br />http://www.myurl.com/robots.txt
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<br />If your server is using a robots.txt file and the page you submit is protected by it, then your page can not be added.
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<br />Categories of Sites
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<br />By sending your web page URL to a search engine, your page will also be considered for categorization under popular topics or, and select or index pages.
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<br />Using META Tags to Describe Your Page
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<br />Specifying an exact description to use:
<br />You can create a description for your web page, rather than having the search engine’s robot use the first 200 characters. Use the <META> tag within the <HEAD> element to do this. The basic syntax is:
<br /><META name="description" content="Write your description here">
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<br />Do not use any HTML tags within the description or content part of the META tag.
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<br />Suppose the HTML at the top of your web page looked like:
<br /><HEAD> <TITLE>My Company Home Page
the following title and description would appear when your page is listed:
My Company Home Page
Home of the World’s Greatest Widget
Specifying keyword phrases:
You can use a second
tag to specify keyword phrases that further describe your web page. The basic syntax is:
For example, if the HTML at the top of your web page looked like:
Acquire Home Mortgae
then the search robot will take them into account when it indexes your page. Using the
tag to add keywords to your page simply allows you to provide extra information about your page without that information appearing to the reader.
Please note that the robot indexes your entire page (except any text within comments), regardless of whether or not you include a description or keywords in the
tags.
The words in the
tags are indexed in addition to the rest of the document.
Notes on Using
Tags and Images
* Length of Description and Keywords
Your description can include up to 200 characters of text. The keywords can include up to 1000 characters of text. Those figures are typical but vary from robot to robot.
* Overusing Keywords
Do not repeat the same keyword more than 7 times in the
tag. If you do this, the robot will ignore the entire list of keywords.
* Sites using Frames
In your main HTML file (the file containing the
