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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: <mailto:LINK%20REV="made"%20HREF="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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