Adding Meta Tags To Your Website
A key element to writing clean, search engine optimized code is the inclusion of meta tags. These tags give information to the search engines that help the engine parse your page. While it is true that these tags are given less weight by the major search engines than they once were given, it is still a good idea to put a little bit of thought behind them. In this article we will focus on the Description, Keywords, Author, and Robots tags.
The Description meta tag is displayed by search engines such as Yahoo when your website appears in the search results. This tag lets you make a first impact on possible visitors to your site, so you want the description to accurately reflect what your site is about. Google uses its own algorithm to come up with content to display for search results. This algorithm takes content from your page. Nevertheless, it is still believed that Google does take the Description tag into consideration when determining where to rank your website.
To include a Description tag, insert the following code right before the </head> tag:
<meta name="description" content="Describe your site in this area" />
Moving on... the Keywords meta tag. At one point the keywords you used on your web pages determined exactly what your pages would rank for. However, since search bots have gotten smarter, keywords don't play as big of a role. It is important that keywords you choose and the content on your page are related to each other. You will want to mix up your keywords with both common words that you would like to rank high for and uncommon words/phrases that there is less competition for. The following is the Keywords tag taken directly from the Spider Web Technologies homepage. Notice that some of the keywords are a single, common word, and others are uncommon three-word phases.
<meta name="keywords" content="web, spider web technologies, web design, web development, website design, website development, web site design, web site development, web page design, web page development, delaware, wilmington, graphic design, search engine, seo" />
Next up is the Author meta tag. This tag is largely optional, and doesn't need much explaining. If you want the search engine to know who wrote the page, you should include this tag, which look like this...
<meta name="author" content="John Smith - YourSite.com" />
Last but not least is the Robots meta tag. This one is important if you do not have a robots.txt file in your directory. It tells the search engine crawler whether or not it should index the current page (whether or not it should be displayed in search results) and whether or not it should follow links on that page. The attributes are link, nolink, follow, and nofollow. Most often you will want <meta name="robots" content="link,follow" />, but sometimes you may wish to substitute link for nolink and follow for nofollow.
Hopefully any questions that you may have had about meta tags have just been cleared up. If not, please feel free to send an email to <contact AT spiderwebtechnologies DOT COM>.