by Emory Rowland
If You Build It, They Will Not Come
Suppose your name is Woody and you want to promote your chainsaw dealership
via the Internet. You build a web site that announces the products and services
of Chainsaw Sales to the world. You design the site with the latest software
tools and host it with the most powerful servers available. You work very hard
and put a lot of time into this project. During the process, you learn a lot
about how web sites work. Your employees notice that the job title on your
business card now reads "Chief Web Developer" instead of "President." You fancy
yourself a technology artist. So proud are you of the new site that you offer
the first ten visitors a free chainsaw valued at $1000. Such a site would
receive thousands of hits from the timber cutting community, right?
You check the statistics a week after publishing the site and learn, to your
disappointment, that it received a mere one hit! Only your mother-in-law who cut
and pasted the link into her AOL browser managed to traverse your work of art.
She now demands that you not only deliver her free chainsaw, but that you use it
to clear a nasty grove of redwoods from her back yard. Family politics aside,
you shouldn't take it personally that no one came to the Internet grand opening
of Chainsaw Sales, should you? Nah. Successful web artists only pity the
competition. Besides, those missing visitors were probably just not aware that
the greatest chainsaw dealership in the world made its web debut. But, how are
people going to find your web site without you actually giving them the address?
Doesn't the Internet do that automatically?
You brew some coffee and perform a Yahoo search using the words "web" and
"promote" and "increase traffic." After a bit of reading you learn that you can
promote your site to various search engines and that you can optimize the
ranking by using something called "meta tags." You read further. As best you can
determine, meta tags announce the topic of your pages, describe their content,
and provide other information useful for search engines in cataloguing pages.
So, if your pages contain meta tags that accurately describe the site, you might
get visitors who will buy some chainsaws. Visitors who search Looksmart.com for
Chainsaw Sales should return results that yield a link to the page and an
accurate description of what they will find there.
I'm an Artist,
not a Programmer
As you research meta tags a bit further, you learn that they are actually
part of the html code inside an html page. Thats a negative because the newly
discovered right side of your brain shuns mathematics. Besides, you have been
warned by your programmer friends of the mysterious missing time phenomenon that
prevents coders from accounting for hours, even days of time. But youve come too
far to let html stand in the way of your technology renaissance. Knowing html
will help you create meta tags, but it's not necessary.
After reviewing meta tags on other web sites, you surmise that they tend to
occur in two forms: the META NAME and the HTTP-EQUIV varieties. The first tag
below tells search engine spiders to come back after two weeks. The second tag
tells spiders when the pages content expires so it knows when to revisit.
Spiders are agents that gather content for search engine databases. Besides the
words META NAME and HTTP-EQUIV, both tags are exactly alike in syntax. The only
other difference is whats inside the quotation marks. The first item in quotes
describes what the tag does, the second item in quotes is the variable or the
part that you change to affect search engine placement.
<META
NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="2 Weeks">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires"
CONTENT="Fri, 04 Dec 2001 21:29:02 GMT">
All meta tags should be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>
tags in your html source. The opening <HEAD> tag usually comes at the
beginning of the source code after the opening <HTML> tag (normally the
very first tag that appears).
The Big Three
The more you research meta tags, the more tag types you discover, each with
its own good intentions. After sifting through over a hundred or so, choosing
the right tags for your web site becomes a confusing task. Even the tag names
themselves can be daunting to the non-programmer. There are actually tags called
Abstractand Pragma.However, three particular tags seem more common than the
others: Title, Keywords, and Description.
The Title tag states the name of your page and perhaps a brief description.
The title of your page should be enclosed between the opening and closing tags,
<TITLE> and </TITLE> respectively. You can simply insert the name of
your home page or company as in:
<TITLE>Chainsaw Sales</TITLE>
Or include the title with a short description as in:
<TITLE>Chainsaw Sales - a cut above saw dealer</TITLE>
The title text is not viewable by your visitors in the page itself, but shows
up in the Windows task bar and in a browsers favorites or bookmarks. If you
include a description in your title, it should not be longer than about five
words or else the browsers favorites will truncate the title when bookmarked.
Notice that the Title tag is a standard html tag and does not include META NAME
and HTTP-EQUIV nor quotation marks.
The Keywords tag makes words that describe the content of your page available
to search engines. Commas should separate the keywords. The most important words
should appear first. You want to think very carefully about which words to use.
Flaunting your vocabulary or using redundancy is usually not the best practice.
Although search engines now place less emphasis on this tag than in previous
years, Inktomi still uses the it. With some careful thought, you place these
keywords in your Keywords meta tag:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Chainsaws, Tools, Trees, Cut, Saws, Blades,
Axes, Hatchets, Wood Chippers, Repair, Rental, Timber Services, Logging, Logs,
Lumber, Pulp, Timber, Pulpwood, Sawdust, Defoliation">
With the Description tag, you want to take a minimalist approach, squeezing
as much important information about your page as possible in the smallest amount
of space. The page description should be less than 200 words. A reflection on
the mission statement and business model of Chainsaw Sales yields the following
Description meta tag:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Whether trees or prices, we love cutting
for our customers. We have the finest, lowest priced chainsaws and timber
cutting tools. Contact us for a free demonstration (please, no redwoods).">
You are confident that most site rankings can be greatly improved by simply
using the big three meta tags. You insert these tags into the source of your
main page and publish it to the web. The tags appear together like this:
<TITLE>Chainsaw Sales - a cut above saw dealer</TITLE>
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Chainsaws, Tools, Trees, Cut, Saws, Blades,
Axes, Hatchets, Wood Chippers, Repair, Rental, Timber Services, Logging, Logs,
Lumber, Pulp, Timber, Pulpwood, Sawdust, Defoliation, Deforestation,
Ardennes">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Whether trees or prices, we love cutting
for our customers. We have the finest, lowest priced chainsaws and timber
cutting tools. Contact us for a free demonstration (please, no
redwoods).">
The Long Arm of Spammers
A few months go by after your meta tag coup. The ten chainsaws from the free
giveaway have been shipped. Your traffic has increased greatly. Your
mother-in-laws redwoods have been cleared. You have received numerous orders via
the Internet. However, you notice that you are suddenly getting a hefty amount
of spam in your inbox. Not that you dont already shovel your share of spam, but
something seems different. This spam is not from the usual spammers, but from
some unfamiliar sources, including some invitations of a particularly deviant
sort.
After some investigating, you discover the culprit was the E-mail meta tag
that you inserted into your web pages. You thought that the tag would be used by
someone who needed to contact you for a business reason. However, it turns out
that spammers (proliferators of unsolicited e-mail) have actually sent out their
own spiders and gathered your e-mail address for unscrupulous marketing
purposes! The solution is to remove your good e-mail address and replace it with
an address that you filter or check once a month, your spam target address.
Beware of the E-mail tag! An example is:
<LINK REV="made"
HREF="myaddress@domain.com">
Conclusion
There is much more to meta tag lore than discussed here. In the above
adventure, Woody looks at the trees, not the forest. Each search engine employs
different methods of gathering data for indexing. Meta tags are not a guarantee
of high placement, but may help rankings with some search engines, especially
when using the big three.
Many programs and free online meta tag generator tools make it easy to create
meta tags without even looking at the html source. One such program is
<http://www.clickfire.com/tools/freeware/metty>Metty Freeware Meta Tag
Maker. After publishing your web pages, keep your eye on the way search engines
are displaying and ranking them. Experiment with meta tags. You may learn
something and you may discover yourself to be an artist.
About
Clickfire
Emory Rowland is webmaster of Clickfire.com (http://www.clickfire.com), a
free resource web site featuring viewpoints, tools, and content for webmasters.
A generous selection of articles, freeware, and graphics are available at
Clickfire.com to serve the needs of newbies and geeks alike.
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