Do you believe that drek? Believe it or not, that is the message that is being given
out on a lot of the web sites about promotion, and in books on the shelf at the bookstore.
Meta tags are not magic. They are, however, an essential part of a well-designed web site
promotion program. So, let's look at how they work and how to put them to work for your
site.
To figure all of this out, let's construct an example and look at each piece of it.
Lets run over to Alta Vista and look for a frog site....
OK. Here we are at Alta Vista. I've searched for 'frogs' and on page 6 of the response
I found this entry:
Isn't that informative? After looking through 6
pages of listings for frogs, would you run over to this site? The person that spent his or
her hard-earned spare time to build this page should get a better reward for all of that
hard work.
What went wrong here? Obviously, the search engine took the first stuff it found that
looked like text instead of HTML. It did the best it could with really limited
information. The author of the page just didn't construct the page to be indexed by search
engines. Let's fix it a piece at a time.
The title isn't bad. It does give some information.
But it could be better. Remember that most search engines give more weight to words found
in the TITLE, especially if those words are also found in the body of the text. So, a
better TITLE might be " Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea" This is much more informative and likely to generate more solid keywords in
the search engines. Especially if we refer to these same words in the body of the page (or
in our other heading sections.) Here's what we have so far:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea</TITLE>
Now, let's give the search engines that don't use meta tags some copy to look at that
we want used in the description. We do this by placing a short comment into the page after
the TITLE tag. Now our page looks like this:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea</TITLE>
<!-- Best prices on pet exotic frogs anywhere on the internet. These White's Tree Frogs
can be shipped overnight to arrive healthy and happy. Order online today. -->
This takes us to your first meta tag: Description. We now give the search engines that
use meta tags the description of the page that we want to have displayed when our page
comes up in a search. Don't make it too long, as the engines will only give a limited
amount of text.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea</TITLE>
<!-- Best prices on pet exotic frogs anywhere on the internet. These White's Tree Frogs
can be shipped overnight to arrive healthy and happy. Order online today. -->
<META Name="description" Content="Best prices on pet exotic frogs
anywhere on the internet. These White's Tree Frogs can be shipped overnight to arrive
healthy and happy. Order online today.">
Now we have told the engines what to say about our site, but we still want to tell them
what keywords we would like to be found under. Please DON'T put keywords in here
just to get traffic. Imagine that you are running a restaurant. Your sign outside can
bring in lots of look-e-loos, but if they don't buy, they just get in the way. They take
up time and space that could be used to take better care of your real customers. Measure
your success by sales (or whatever is relevant to your site) and not by pounds of visitors
you con into coming to your site.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas
caerulea</TITLE>
<!-- Best prices on pet exotic frogs anywhere on the internet. These White's Tree Frogs
can be shipped overnight to arrive healthy and happy. Order online today. -->
<META Name="description" Content="Best prices on pet exotic frogs
anywhere on the internet. These White's Tree Frogs can be shipped overnight to arrive
healthy and happy. Order online today.">
<META Name="keywords" Content="FROG, FROGS, WHITE'S TREE FROG, PET FROG,
FROGS FOR SALE, ONLINE SALES, ONLINE ORDER, ON LINE ORDER, PET EXOTIC FROG, EXOTIC
FROG">
</HEAD>
Now our entry in the Alta Vista results should look something like this:
