Suppose your name is Woody and you want to
promote your chainsaw dealership via the Internet. You build a web site
that announces the products and services of Chainsaw Sales to the world.
You design the site with the latest software tools and host it with the
most powerful servers available. You work very hard and put a lot of
time into this project. During the process, you learn a lot about how
web sites work. Your employees notice that the job title on your
business card now reads "Chief Web Developer" instead of "President."
You fancy yourself a technology artist. So proud are you of the new site
that you offer the first ten visitors a free chainsaw valued at $1000.
Such a site would receive thousands of hits from the timber cutting
community, right?
You check the statistics a week after publishing the site and learn, to
your disappointment, that it received a mere one hit! Only your
mother-in-law who cut and pasted the link into her AOL browser managed
to traverse your work of art. She now demands that you not only deliver
her free chainsaw, but that you use it to clear a nasty grove of
redwoods from her back yard. Family politics aside, you shouldn't take
it personally that no one came to the Internet grand opening of Chainsaw
Sales, should you? Nah. Successful web artists only pity the
competition. Besides, those missing visitors were probably just not
aware that the greatest chainsaw dealership in the world made its web
debut. But, how are people going to find your web site without you
actually giving them the address? Doesn't the Internet do that
automatically?
You brew some coffee and perform a Yahoo search using the words "web"
and "promote" and "increase traffic." After a bit of reading you learn
that you can promote your site to various search engines and that you
can optimize the ranking by using something called "meta tags." You read
further. As best you can determine, meta tags announce the topic of your
pages, describe their content, and provide other information useful for
search engines in cataloguing pages. So, if your pages contain meta tags
that accurately describe the site, you might get visitors who will buy
some chainsaws. Visitors who search Looksmart.com for Chainsaw Sales
should return results that yield a link to the page and an accurate
description of what they will find there.
I'm an Artist, not a Programmer As you research meta tags a bit further,
you learn that they are actually part of the html code inside an html
page. Thats a negative because the newly discovered right side of your
brain shuns mathematics. Besides, you have been warned by your
programmer friends of the mysterious missing time phenomenon that
prevents coders from accounting for hours, even days of time. But youve
come too far to let html stand in the way of your technology
renaissance. Knowing html will help you create meta tags, but it's not
necessary.
After reviewing meta tags on other web sites, you surmise that they tend
to occur in two forms: the META NAME and the HTTP-EQUIV varieties. The
first tag below tells search engine spiders to come back after two
weeks. The second tag tells spiders when the pages content expires so it
knows when to revisit. Spiders are agents that gather content for search
engine databases. Besides the words META NAME and HTTP-EQUIV, both tags
are exactly alike in syntax. The only other difference is whats inside
the quotation marks. The first item in quotes describes what the tag
does, the second item in quotes is the variable or the part that you
change to affect search engine placement.
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="2 Weeks"> <META HTTP-EQUIV="expires"
CONTENT="Fri, 04 Dec 2001 21:29:02 GMT">
All meta tags should be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags in
your html source. The opening <HEAD> tag usually comes at the beginning
of the source code after the opening <HTML> tag (normally the very first
tag that appears). <!-pagebreak-> The Big Three
The more you research meta tags, the more tag types you discover, each
with its own good intentions. After sifting through over a hundred or
so, choosing the right tags for your web site becomes a confusing task.
Even the tag names themselves can be daunting to the non-programmer.
There are actually tags called Abstractand Pragma.However, three
particular tags seem more common than the others: Title, Keywords, and
Description.
The Title tag states the name of your page and perhaps a brief
description. The title of your page should be enclosed between the
opening and closing tags, <TITLE> and </TITLE> respectively. You can
simply insert the name of your home page or company as in:
<TITLE>Chainsaw Sales</TITLE> Or include the title with a short
description as in: <TITLE>Chainsaw Sales - a cut above saw
dealer</TITLE>
The title text is not viewable by your visitors in the page itself, but
shows up in the Windows task bar and in a browsers favorites or
bookmarks. If you include a description in your title, it should not be
longer than about five words or else the browsers favorites will
truncate the title when bookmarked. Notice that the Title tag is a
standard html tag and does not include META NAME and HTTP-EQUIV nor
quotation marks.
The Keywords tag makes words that describe the content of your page
available to search engines. Commas should separate the keywords. The
most important words should appear first. You want to think very
carefully about which words to use. Flaunting your vocabulary or using
redundancy is usually not the best practice. Although search engines now
place less emphasis on this tag than in previous years, Inktomi still
uses the it. With some careful thought, you place these keywords in your
Keywords meta tag:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Chainsaws, Tools, Trees, Cut, Saws,
Blades, Axes, Hatchets, Wood Chippers, Repair, Rental, Timber Services,
Logging, Logs, Lumber, Pulp, Timber, Pulpwood, Sawdust, Defoliation">
With the Description tag, you want to take a minimalist approach,
squeezing as much important information about your page as possible in
the smallest amount of space. The page description should be less than
200 words. A reflection on the mission statement and business model of
Chainsaw Sales yields the following Description meta tag:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Whether trees or prices, we love
cutting for our customers. We have the finest, lowest priced chainsaws
and timber cutting tools. Contact us for a free demonstration (please,
no redwoods).">
You are confident that most site rankings can be greatly improved by
simply using the big three meta tags. You insert these tags into the
source of your main page and publish it to the web. The tags appear
together like this:
<TITLE>Chainsaw Sales - a cut above saw dealer</TITLE>
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Chainsaws, Tools, Trees, Cut, Saws,
Blades, Axes, Hatchets, Wood Chippers, Repair, Rental, Timber Services,
Logging, Logs, Lumber, Pulp, Timber, Pulpwood, Sawdust, Defoliation,
Deforestation, Ardennes">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Whether trees or prices, we love
cutting for our customers. We have the finest, lowest priced chainsaws
and timber cutting tools. Contact us for a free demonstration (please,
no redwoods)."> <!-pagebreak-> The Long Arm of Spammers
A few months go by after your meta tag coup. The ten chainsaws from the
free giveaway have been shipped. Your traffic has increased greatly.
Your mother-in-laws redwoods have been cleared. You have received
numerous orders via the Internet. However, you notice that you are
suddenly getting a hefty amount of spam in your inbox. Not that you dont
already shovel your share of spam, but something seems different. This
spam is not from the usual spammers, but from some unfamiliar sources,
including some invitations of a particularly deviant sort.
After some investigating, you discover the culprit was the E-mail meta
tag that you inserted into your web pages. You thought that the tag
would be used by someone who needed to contact you for a business
reason. However, it turns out that spammers (proliferators of
unsolicited e-mail) have actually sent out their own spiders and
gathered your e-mail address for unscrupulous marketing purposes! The
solution is to remove your good e-mail address and replace it with an
address that you filter or check once a month, your spam target address.
Beware of the E-mail tag! An example is:
<LINK REV="made" HREF="myaddress@domain.com">
Conclusion
There is much more to meta tag lore than discussed here. In the above
adventure, Woody looks at the trees, not the forest. Each search engine
employs different methods of gathering data for indexing. Meta tags are
not a guarantee of high placement, but may help rankings with some
search engines, especially when using the big three.
Many programs and free online meta tag generator tools make it easy to
create meta tags without even looking at the html source. One such
program is <http://www.clickfire.com/tools/freeware/metty>Metty Freeware
Meta Tag Maker. After publishing your web pages, keep your eye on the
way search engines are displaying and ranking them. Experiment with meta
tags. You may learn something and you may discover yourself to be an
artist.
About Clickfire
Emory Rowland is webmaster of Clickfire.com, a free resource web site
featuring viewpoints, tools, and content for webmasters. A generous
selection of articles, freeware, and graphics are available at
Clickfire.com to serve the needs of newbies and geeks alike.
"Reprinted from Zongoo.com Daily Press & Consumer Information"
