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Designing
for Search Engines: Use of Meta Tags
Meta
tags facilitate indexing by most search engines; in a few
search engines, meta tags may improve site placement in
the results list.
Meta
tags are not seen by users of your web page. They are resident
in the code as part of the metadata available to search engines
for judging the content of your site. While there are many
types of meta tags, we recommend the following to help your
web site be found by search engines. Be particularly alert
to using meta tags if your homepage consists almost entirely
of text set as graphics.
Keyword. This
meta tag contains words which complement the text content of
the page in which they are contained. Use them to add synonyms
and word variants, as well as foreign-language terms if applicable.
Example: <meta
name="keyword" content="green house, greenhouse,
orchid, orchidaceae">
Description. This
meta tag contains a sentence descriptive of your web page.
Don't use an identical descriptive statement for each page
of your web site. Tailor the sentence directly to the content
of the page, although some of the words may be the same
as the content of the description for the top page of your
site.
Example: <meta
name="description" content="The Wellesley
College greenhouse has a superior collection of orchids in
its Orchid House." >
How and
Where to Place Meta Tags in Your Web Page
Meta
tags are placed between the <head> and </head> tags
in your document. First think of the keywords and a sentence
to describe each page you are authoring. To actually create
meta tags in Dreamweaver 3.0, do the following:
Pull
down the "Insert" menu and select "head" and "keywords".
Type page-appropriate keywords into the box, separated by commas.
Then click on the "OK" button.
Example:
meta tag, search engine, Dreamweaver, web page
Next,
pull down the "Insert" menu and select "head" and "description".
Type a sentence describing the page content into the box. Then
click on the "OK" button.
Example:
This page describes the importance of meta tags for search
engines and tells how to create them for your web pages.
Please
note that Dreamweaver automatically inserts one meta tag automatically
into your page:
<meta
http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
This
code tells the browser that it is seeing an HTML page and it
should regard it as using a specified ISO character set. Don't
remove this code if you see it when looking at the HTML source.
Questions?
Contact Digital
Technologies.
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