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The META information tag is placed within the Header of your
HTML document to allow Internet Search Engines like AltaVista to index the
document. An effectively indexed document can be found more easily
by the people who want the information. The META tag is not visible when the web
page is viewed normally with a browser, but can be seen when the
"document's source" information is viewed.
Search engines that operate like AltaVista have an automatic
indexing system. When you wish to add a new Web site to the search engine you
enter the URL of that site. An automatic 'web spider' will look at your document,
and in the absence of a META tag, will read the first few lines of text and use
the words in this text to index the document. As you can imagine, this gives
inconsistent results!
When a META tag is correctly inserted into the document header,
the "robot search program" or "web spider" will look at the information in the tag and use this to index the
document. The advantage is that you have exact control over the search
'keywords' the web spider will read. In addition, other META tags can be
inserted, including one that controls the documents 'description' which appears
in the 'search engine result'.
If we take the 'keywords' and 'description' META tags as the
basic elements, then the correct application of these will produce the following
results when the 'document source' information is viewed (see Netscape's or MS
Explorer's 'View'
pull down menu to see the source code of this page).
At the top of the source code for this page, you'll see this:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language"
content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<META NAME="description"
CONTENT="META
Tag
Use in
Web Site Marketing">
<META NAME="keywords"
CONTENT=" web marketing,search engine,meta
tags,site indexing,commerce blvd">
<META NAME="copyright"
CONTENT="1999-2007">
<META NAME="author"
CONTENT="Commerce Blvd,
Inc.">
<META NAME="RATING"
CONTENT="General">
<META NAME="ROBOTS"
CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="REVISIT-AFTER"
CONTENT="30 days">
<META NAME="ROBOTS"
CONTENT="ALL">
<title>META Tags</title>
</HEAD>
The 'search engine result' for this web page will now appear
on AltaVista like this:
META
Tags
META Tag
Use in
Web Site Marketing
http://www.commerceblvd.com/marketing/metatags.htm
By carefully selecting and ordering your
keywords, you can get more accurate 'hits' on your web pages. Thinking carefully
about your target audience, and what they are likely to type in a search engine
is essential for a successful ranking in the search engine databases. This will
increase the likelihood that visitors will be able to find your site.
The comma's separating the keywords are not read by the web spiders and are not essential. However, they can be put in as a visual aid to
make it easier to see any 'strings' of keywords. A space between each keyword is
required (a comma is read as a space).
When a new or modified Meta Tag has been added to a page that
is already indexed in a search engine, it will not have any effect until the
search engine web spider has revisited the page, read it, and updated it's
database. This can be done manually by resubmitting your site to the
search engine. This should only be done every 30-90 days depending on the
engine. Some search engines will consider it spam if you resubmit more
often, resulting in the rejection of listing your site altogether.
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META Tags