How To Use Meta-Tags
Meta-Tags are a helpful tool in web design. They are not a visual component on the web page, but they allow you to give your web site a description, and keywords which describe content. These can make it easier for search engines to index your site where people are more likely to find it.
There are several meta tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the description and keywords tags. The description tag returns a description of the page in place of the summary the search engine would ordinarily create. The keywords tag provides keywords for the search engine to associate with your page. Different search engines use meta tags in slightly different ways, but nearly all search engines utilize meta tags for the process of indexing, in some way or another.
For a chart listing the indexing methods that different search engines use, go to the Search Engine Features page.
Meta Tags are very simple to incorporate in your web site. You can either generate them in Microsoft Frontpage, or insert them into the html using the code below.
- To use Microsoft Frontpage, simply right-click on the page you are working on, select page properties, then click on the "custom" tab. Click on "Add" under the user variables section. In the Name field, type "description", and in the Value field, type your description of your webpage. To give your site some keywords, add another user variable, and type "keywords" under the Name field. Then type keywords your describing content under the Value field.
- To generate meta tags using html code, you will replace the purple text in the code below with your own description, and the green text with your own keywords. Once you have modified the following code, paste it in between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags in the full html code of your page. (These are located near the top of the page.) In the Frontpage editor, you can view the html code of you page by clicking the HTML tab at the bottom of the screen.
<META name="description" content="Everything you wanted to know about stamps, from prices to
history.">
<META name="keywords" content="stamps, stamp collecting, stamp history, prices, stamps for
sale">
Here are a couple of good resources concerning meta-tags:
- How To Use HTML Meta Tags
- Back to Basics - META Tags covers some of the more advanced uses of meta tags also.
Other things to do which will help get your page listed by search engines is to use "keywords" which are relevant to your page's topic near the top of the page, and also submit your page's URL to search engines which allow submission.
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Kate Akers akersk@missouri.edu Last revised: 12/12/06 |
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