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Tips for Preparing Your Web Pages for Indexing: <META> Tags
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Alma Mater Software, Inc.
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Contents
Search Engines Using <META> Tags
Two leading search engines, AltaVista and InfoSeek, will recognize two
special HTML <META> tags, keywords and
description. The keywords tag allows the search engine
to more accurately index your pages, and the description tag
allows it to to display a summary, or "abstract" of the contents of
the page.
What's a <META> Tag?
The <META> element is part of the HTML language. Like the
<TITLE>, it appears in the HTML <HEAD> section. The
<META> element provides a general way to embed database fields
in an HTML page by specifying the field's "name" and "content."
For example, say you wanted to track your Web pages'
authors and company departments. You could add <META> tags to
the HTML <HEAD> as follows:
<HTML><HEAD> ... <META name="author" content="Hinsdale, John">
<META name="dept" content="Marketing"> ... </HEAD>
In this example, the author is John Hinsdale, and the page is
associated with the Marketing department. Database software which
recognizes <META> tags can extract this information for indexing
and searching.
The "keywords" tag
Use a <META> tag whose name is "keywords" to supply a list of
keywords that should be used to index the page. These words will be
indexed by the search engine in addition to the words that appear
on the page.
Example: On a Web page that describes a recipe for lasagne, you
may want to add this tag:
<HTML><HEAD> ...
<META name="keywords" content="cooking pasta lasagne recipe">
... </HEAD>
This will cause searches on "pasta" to retrieve this page as being
relevant or important.
The "description" tag
Use a <META> tag whose name is "description" to supply a summary
of the contents of the page. This summary will be displayed by the
search engine instead of the first few sentences of the page, which is
the best it can do by default. Often, the first few sentences of a
Web page does not serve as a summary of the page. In addition,
some of the material on the page may exist in graphic form, which
is not indexable by the search engine. In this case the use of
a "description" <META> tag is essential.
Example: On our lasagne recipe page, we could use this
tag to serve as a summary:
<HTML><HEAD> ...
<META name="description" content="A recipe for a delicious lasagne
with three kinds of cheese and a homemade tomato sauce.">
... </HEAD>
Now, when the page appears as in the result of the search, the single
sentence given in the tag will be used as the summary, rather than the
first few lines of text on the page.
NEXT: Using <IMG alt="..."> tags
Copyright © 1996 Alma Mater Software, Inc.