Reawen's HTML Help
~Meta Tags~

Once your page is up and running you may want to register it with search engines to create more traffic to your site. To register, pick which search engine you're going to register at, and go to their main page (Examples: www.yahoo.com, www.excite.com, or www.altavista.com). Look around on the pages, and somewhere (usually at the bottom) they'll be a link that says something like "Add your URL" or "Add your Site"... if you click on that, the engine should guide you through what you need to do.

In order for the search engine to know what key words to associate with your page, however, you must tell it with <meta> tags. There are actually two that are helpful to have. One <meta> tag tells the search engine key words or phrases to pick up on, the other offers a short description of the page to the person doing the searching. Have you ever used a search engine? In case you are unfamiliar with it, to "search" you put in a key word for what you're looking for, such as "birds". The search engine then searches the web for any pages about birds. When it comes up with a list, there is usually some way to read the discription of that page (sometimes it is automatically shown, sometimes you have to click a button for it, whatever).

Here's how <meta> tags work: first of all, <meta> tags, like the <title> tags, are placed between the <head> and </head> tags. Descriptions need to be short, but... well... descriptive. Hopefully they'll convince searchers to go to your site, rather than the others located by the engine. When listing key words for the search enging to pick up on, separate them by a comma. Here's the format for meta tags:

<head>
<title>The title here</title>
<meta name="description" content="Write a brief description of your page and its contents here.">
<meta name="keywords" content="list, your, key, words, here">
</head>


Now, lets go back to that search about birds. Suppose we had a page about birds we wanted to generate traffic to. Here's what the beginning code for our page might look like:

<head>
<title>Facts About Birds</title>
<meta name="description" content="This page has facts about various types of birds. An excellent reference.">
<meta name="keywords" content="bird, parakeet, cardinal, robin, goldfinch, hummingbird>"
</head>


This <meta> tag for "keywords" tells the search engine to list it if someone enters the search words "bird," "parakeet," "cardinal," "robin," "goldfinch," or "hummingbird."

NOTE: You do not need to "close" meta tags with a </meta>.


Back to Reawen's "HTML for Beginners"

 1