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Meta Tags

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="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.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Joe's Broom Warehouse and Pail Emporium</TITLE>

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="The largest broom and pail warehouse in Kansas! Thousands to choose from - Visa and Mastercard accepted.">

</HEAD>
<BODY>

<H1>Joe's Broom Warehouse and Pail Emporium</H1>

etc. ...

You will probably be interested in EngineLink where you can list your site in over 1,000 search Engines and Directories for free.

Spiders & Robots

The above search engines are indexed using spiders or robots. These creatures read Meta tags in web pages. Basically the search engines reach out to your site and follow all the links gathering information about each page.
Sometimes you, the webmaster might want to exclude spiders from parts of your site. The pages may not be finished, may be too dynamic for indexing or may be only for certain users to access

You can make robots ignore your page using a meta tag or you can create a file called robots.txt which contains a set of rules for the robot. The file is placed in the root directory and is part of the voluntary Robots Exclusion Standard, and it gives the robots a list of which directories on the site are not to be indexed.

Using meta tags