Meta Tags are HTML tags that
help search engines understand the contents of your page.
They belong in the <head> area of your web pages. The
two that are most important for search engines are the description
tag and the keyword tag. The description tag should contain
a summary of the content of the page or website for the homepage.
The keywords tag should contain keyword phrases or words and
short phrases that you think people will use in a search engine
to find you page.
Here is an example of each type;
<meta name="description" content="Business
news and financial reports by the DailyBusinessNews.com. Focused
on business trends, core topics include the stock market,
economy, investment opportunities, and recent events."
/>
<meta name="keywords" content="business,
invest, investing, investment,
stock, stocks, stock market, economy, recent events"
/>
Here are some things to keep in mind about the meta tags.
A very important point to remember is to include the keywords
in the content of your webpage.
A possible exception to this rule is that you may want to
include common misspellings and plurals of important words.
For example, if your site is about travel to the Caribbean
you may want to include Caribean or Carribean as well to catch
people who’ve misspelled it in their search. Because
of Google’s wariness over trusting meta tags and the
fact that you will not want to add the misspelled words into
your content you should be very cautious about adding misspellings
into your keyword tags.
However, definitely avoid the urge to add a dictionary’s
worth of words into your meta tags in the hopes of showing
up on the search engines for any word possible. While it is
a positive if the keywords show up in the content on your
page, if you have keywords that are not related to your content
it can hurt your ranking.
It is recommended that your Keywords are around 50-80 characters
and stay under 1024 characters including spaces and that your
Description tag stays below 250 characters including spaces.
The contents of the description tag is what will most likely
show up on the search engine results page for your site so
you’ll want to make sure to add one so that your site
is displayed in a meaningful way.
When you are adding your keywords add specific keyword phrases
as well as single words. Make sense and don’t just add
random keywords.
For example, if a mechanic has a website for her garage,
‘car repair’ would be better than ‘car’
and ‘repair’ although all three would be best.
Don’t be surprised if you aren’t ranked #1 (or
ranked on the first few pages even) for keywords like ‘car’
or ‘coffee’ or anything which may already have
many websites about that subject already. It’s much
better if you can go after a tailored phrase like ‘classic
car restoration’ or ‘remote control model cars’.
Make sure to do this for each page on your website based
on its contents. Again, if the keywords are not related to
the contents it will hurt your ranking.
This brings us to the Title Tag. The title tag is HTML that
displays at the very top of the browser. It belongs inside
the head tag and looks like this;
<title>Wild Bill’s Pizza Parlor – the best
New York style Italian pizza in town</title>
The title tag is also factored into search engine equations
to determine the content and rank of the site. Like the meta
tags this should be written individually for each page and
should contain keyword phrases. Notice that ‘New York
style Italian pizza’ might bring in searches for Italian
food as well as for pizza as well as being more specific so
that you will have better luck getting people searching for
New York style pizza as well.
The search engine gods like things to be very structured
and plain, and using Header Tags will help
you to appease them. Header tags are used to create large
bold faced text to mark the major areas and sub-areas of your
page. They look like this;
<h1>Using HTML to improve your Search Engine Rank.</h1>
<h2>Meta Tags</h2>
<h3>The Description tag</h3>
These tags would display on the page like this;
Using HTML to improve your Search Engine Rank.
Meta Tags
The Description tag
A search engine will read these tags to determine the content
and relative importance of the content areas on your HTML pages.
When you are arranging the layout of your page be aware that
search engines read the HTML for you page in a linear way,
not as it’s displayed on the screen. That is, if you
have 3 columns on your page and the center column is the main
part of your content where the left hand column is comprised
of ads or navigation it can hurt your ranking to some degree
because the engine will read the left hand column first and
set a higher priority to it than the center column because
it comes first in the HTML.
The problem with all this is that a very Google friendly
page may not be very attractive to the humans actually using
the site. It can be a tough act to balance pleasing both the
humans and the machines.
Search engines can’t understand the contents of any
picture on your site. It’s all just dots to the machine.
Using Alt Tags will help search engines understand
the content on your site as well as helping some people with
disabilities to use your site as well. When you put your mouse
over an image on a webpage and leave it there for a moment
a yellow box will appear with a description of the image if
you’ve set the Alt tag. In HTML it looks like this;
<img src=”picture123.jpg” alt=”This
is a snap shot of my web site coming up #1 on Google.”>
When you register your domain name keep in mind that the
owner’s address is taken into account for local search
results. As well, the admin and technical contact details
are checked for consistency as spammers typically falsify
them.
As with images, search engines have trouble interpreting
FLASH and Image Maps. There
are no alt tags for FLASH but what you can do is text on the
page above or below the FLASH to indicate what an image or
animation actually is. Sometimes this is just not feasible
as it will make the site look ugly. You may be tempted to
add some text to the page that is the same color as the background
making it invisible but don’t. These clever search engines
can detect this and will drop your rating because they see
it as an attempt to ‘cheat’ the system. FLASH
and image maps that are used for navigation are a problem
for search engines because they can’t follow it but
you can use a site map to help which we’ll look at further
on in this overview.
In the early days of search engines, Frames
and Dynamic URLs were indecipherable to search
engines spiders but now the big name players are able to sort
them out. However, some of the smaller search engines still
may not be able to understand them so you may want to avoid
them if you can. Also, dynamically created pages will not
be picked up in a search engine. For example, if you have
a website search feature, Google won’t be able to read
the results pages because it can’t type anything into
the search box.
Google has got billions of web pages to search through. You
can make their lives a little easier by moving the JavaScript
to another file rather than letting the spider run through
hundreds of lines of code in the head of your page where JavaScript
is conventionally kept.
You can move your JavaScript to another page like this;
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" SRC="externalfile.js">
</SCRIPT>
You can still call the JavaScript in the same way as if it
were listed in the head of the page. CSS should also be kept
in an external file. Save the CSS code in
a file with a .css extension (for example; MyStyleSheet.css)
and in the header of your HTML page add the following code;
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="MyStyleSheet.css" />
Also, you can direct the search engines not to spider certain
pages if you don’t want them listed using a robots.txt.
For a guide on how to create one see the robots.txt tutorial on Search Engine
World.
This leads us to the Google SiteMap XML
protocol. In the words of Google:
The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines
about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling.
In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Google Sitemap
Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. The protocol
was written to be highly scalable so it can accommodate sites
of any size. It also enables webmasters to include additional
information about each URL (when it was last updated; how
often it changes; how important it is in relation to other
URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently
crawl the site.
Here is an example of what a sitemap looks like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
< url>
< loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
< lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
< changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
< priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
The creation process is straightforward but there are some
big gotchas that can cause your Sitemap to fail to work. The
XML file or Sitemap must be entity-escaped and the file must
be UTF-8 encoded.
To escape the URLs you’ll have to replace symbols like
“ and & with their ASCII code equivalents of "
and &
To save the file as UTF-8 in Microsoft Word select Save As
and then click Tools in the upper-right hand part of the SaveAs
window and select Web Options. Then click the Encoding tab
and then in the “Save this document as” drop down
box select UTF-8. In Notepad you can click save as and then
change to UTF-8 in the Encoding drop down box.
This page on Google has more information on how to create
a Google Sitemap.
You should create a regular Site Map for
your website as well although if you have the XML Google Sitemap
this may be unneeded for Google. It can’t hurt though,
especially if you have a navigation bar that uses images or
are using an image map or FLASH for navigation. Using DHTML
or CSS and JavaScript can also make a navigation
bar unreadable by search engines.
A site map should contain a link to every page on your site
and a link from each page on your site to the map, especially
the homepage.
When you link to other areas of your site or other sites
the Hyperlinks should contain keyword phrases
for the contents to be found at the destination page. For
example, A
fun page with links to games, puzzles, weird sites and news
for when you are bored.. ‘Click here’ just
doesn’t mean much to a search engine spider. When you
link to another site you may want to open that site in a new
window.
Each page of your site should contain at least 200 words
of content or copy on it. Again, remember to include keyword
phrases.
Having visitors go to your site from a bookmarked link will
also help you. You can provide your visitors (using FireFox
or IE) to bookmark your site. Here is a handy little bit of
Javascript that will open the bookmarking dialogue window
with the URL and description already added.
<a href="javascript:window.external.AddFavorite('http://hostbiztools.com',
'HostSearch Web Hosting Directory');">Click to Bookmark
our Site!</a>
The result would display like this; Click to Bookmark our Site!
Search engines also analyze pages based on content, where
the divisions and subdivisions of a page are, the font, word
location and even content on neighboring pages in factoring
search engine return results.
Ironically, this is also a reason why sites with poor content
can have a higher rank than a site with good content- they
are simply better optimized.
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