Within every website there are elements that create the page. These elements are what we call HTML code. HTML code can be made up of many things from Java Script, to cookies, to the tags that are used to make the words appear the way they do, links to pages, pictures or graphics, and other elements some of which are great to use others are better used in certain ways or not at all.
The barest and most basic of all websites is a file that ends in .html (there are other types of file endings but for simplicity we will consider them all the be html files) . What is contained within these files is what a serving website sends to your browser when you click a link to a page. All the information that is presented, links to other pages, graphics that show up and where are all controlled by the Code that is put into these pages. How the code is put into the page determines how the information is shown to the viewer and also crawled by the SE’s.
All web pages contain a variety of things, For details on HTML code you can check with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortiom) for the current standards they set forth. For me to go into all the various tags here would take a whole section. I will focus on the most necessary elements, and the ones to avoid or use in other ways.
Meta Description is a tag that describes your page to the search engine. It needs to be unique among the many pages of the site. This can be in a minor form for example my Flavored Coffee pages on my Coffee-n-Caffeine site each have the name of the flavored coffee contained within the description of the Meta Description tag. This tells the SE’s that this page contains…. Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee as an example. Description tags should contain at least 100 characters in the form of words that make sense. Example “Coffee-n-Caffeine offering Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, 100% Gourmet Flavored Coffee, Fuzzy Navel, Blends, Fair Trade Organic, Caffeine, Retail, wholesale“
Meta Keywords – This is where you put in key words not only for your site but also for the page as well. Most of the SE’s like to see differences in these tags as well. So using the same tag line throughout the site is not a good thing. It will not hurt you but it is better to have each of them being slightly different. Key words or phrases are important as combined with the other meta tags it helps the SE’s properly index your site for what you think is important on the site. Example “Fuzzy Navel Flavored Coffee, Coffee-n-Caffeine, Coffeecaffeine.com, Gourmet Food, Gourmet Coffee, Coffee, Coffee Beans, Coffee Gift, Caffeine, Coffee Information, Organic coffee, Fair Trade coffee, Earth Friendly, Free Coffee, Online Ordering, Kosher Coffee“. Again long enough and with the changing of the name of the coffee and some other changes throughout the various pages, you can gain an advantage.
The other tags that are good but not as important are the following
doc-class content=“Living Document” this tells the SE’s that this page changes.
meta name=“author” content=“author name” Tells the SE’s who wrote the page… not very important.
meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow” this tells the SE’s that they should follow the links on the page and read the page. Not important if it’s missing, but better to have it there.
meta name=“revisit-after” content=“1 Week” this tells the SE’s how often they should return. Rest assured that even with a 1 week return if you follow the other things I point out in this section you will be indexed more than several times per day.
meta name=“language” content=“EN” This tells the SE’s what your language is so that it knows how to read your site. Believe it or not the SE’s can read most all languages.
meta name=“copyright” content=“Copyright holder” this is basically a tag that says the content is yours and you have the copyright. Not important but you should use it.
meta name=“rating” content=“kids” - this one shoud be adjusted depending on what rating the site is. If it is an adult site then it should be changed it helps the SE’s and also the Parental Filters that are being used.
These tags will help your site get better results from the SE’s.
Sparky