Meta Tags, Search Engines and  You!

There are a few things you must keep in mind  when creating web pages that you intend on submitting to search engines. There  is no magic behind getting your site listed within the engines, although there  are some slanted business practices. Here is the scoop!

The reason some sites get top listed on  certain search engines is due to a purchased package. These paying customers are  paying the company that owns the search engine to place them before others. In a  case like this you will never reach the top unless you pay too. The more money  you fork out, the better the odds that you will be at the top of the  list.

Another reason is that numerous sites  categorize by Domain or Geographical region. If you submit a site to Canada.com  for instance and you tell them that the URL is Canadian, you will possibly be  rated higher and automatically be listed higher on the list. Some search engines  will not even accept submissions unless you are from that region.

The category you submit your site in matters  too. If you submit a "Nutritional Diet" site into an "Agricultural Farm  Equipment" category, you will probably not get as many hits as if you were in  lets say "Food" or "Healthy Lifestyles".

The frequency of resubmission and targetting  of which sites you list yourself on all help as well. It's not so much the  quantity of search engines you list youself on. If you list yourself on 500  search engines that you have never heard, chances are that no one will find out  about you when they use the search engines of their choice. Try listing your  site only on search engines you have checked out yourself, and don't waste your  time with the ones you have not. There is an exception to the rule. In posting  to regional engines, you probably will not have heard of them before. That  doesn't really matter. Chances are that people who will be interested in your  site will or that other engines will pick up info from this one when they  collaborate information. Submit to regional engines regardless of whether you  have heard of it before or not (unless the engine is called  mybig-giant-dildo.com or something like that).

Finally, there are the things that one must  do within their own HTML that will greatly aid in  getting yourself published high on the lists of search engines.

One of these is creating a title for the  page that is descriptive. Search engines spider through sites and create  profiles of pages. One of the tags it takes great interest in is the <TITLE> tag.  Make your title relevant to the page and not longer than lets say 50 characters.

An example is <TITLE>Make it relevant to  the page</TITLE>

Next up would be a description of the  site. When the search engine lists the site, it is this description that will be  posted with the URL. Make is concise and try not to use all Upper Case for the  words. The this can be longer than 50 characters. I would not recommend going  over 100 though, and make sure the important stuff is at the beginning. People  don't want to read a huge description and it will turn them off, besides, most  engines will truncate the description if it is too long and make your  description look stupid anyway. Rule of thumb: Keep it simple and short.

An example is <META  Name="description"Content="Whitby Wildcats  minor hockey, Durham Region. Tyke thru Midget">

Following this, you should have a list  of key words. These help describe your site. Put the most important ones first.  If it is a phrase or a few words that go together but make no sense seperated  then put the words together without a comma between them. The comma will be used  to parse the key words into seperate words for use by the database doing  queries. Some use spaces as well, but hey, at least you get your phrase into  some of the search engines in tact (You can beat the space by using unicode or  hex characters in the URL. Try using %20 everywhere you would use a space. This  is the ASCII representation in hexidecimal and will fool even more search  engines when the do a write). Try not to capitalize every word in the key words  either. That could be a hinderance. Places, Names, and Acronyms (don't forget to  use these as a keyword – it is important) should be capitalized with everything  else in lower case. You may duplicate words within the keywords. I have noted  other sites doing this with their source, but have not noticed a difference in  doing so myself. Some sites also place a large string of keywords into the  bottom of their document as published text. They generally use the same colour  for the font as the background colour to hide this fact from visitors. I have  never tried this but assume it is used by some search engines that develop their  own keywords through content spidering.

An example of a key words meta tag is <META  Name="keywords"Content=" Whitby,Wildcats,minor,hockey,official,hockey,Ontario,Durham,conference,south,  junior,sport,OMHA,OHA,association,Iroquois,hockey,community,arena">

I found a good site online that covers  Robots. I give credit to http://www.paytoclick.com/robot.htm for this information.

Jamie  French

Robots and Spiders

Robots/spiders list
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html 

Robot/spider meta tag  commands:

The Robots META tag is a simple mechanism to  indicate to visiting Web Robots if a page should be indexed, or links on the  page should be followed.

Note: Currently  only few robots support this tag!

Where to put the Robots META  tag

Like any META tag it should be  placed in the HEAD section of an HTML page:

<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

                <meta name="description" content="This page ....">
<title>...</title>
</head>
<body>
...
What to put into the Robots META tag

                The content of the Robots META tag contains directives separated by commas. 
The currently defined directives are [NO] INDEX and [NO] FOLLOW.
The INDEX directive specifies if an indexing robot should index the page. 

                The FOLLOW directive specifies if a robot is to follow links on the page. 
The defaults are INDEX and FOLLOW.
The values ALL and NONE set all directives on or off: 
ALL=INDEX, FOLLOW and NONE= NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW.
                

Some examples:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

                <meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

Note the "robots" name of the tag and the  content are case insensitive.

You obviously should not specify conflicting or repeating directives such as:

<meta name="robots" content="INDEX,NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW,FOLLOW,FOLLOW">

A formal syntax for the Robots META tag  content is:

content    = all | none | directives
all        = "ALL"

                none       = "NONE"
directives = directive ["," directives]
directive  = index | follow
index      = "INDEX" | "NOINDEX"
                
follow     = "FOLLOW" | "NOFOLLOW"

spiderhunter.com/spiderlist/ list of 358 known spiders. At spiderhunter.com find  spider name and IP address from Altavista, inktomi.com, hotbot, google,  northernlight, lycos, excite and infoseek.

http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~sxw/robots/botwatch.html BotWatch is a short perl script that analyses log files (in either the Common, or NCSA  Extended log file formats) and produces an HTML page reporting on the robots  seen.

Non-Active Sitemap
Copyright © 2000-2010 Whitehats.ca Hosting by Trustwave Holdings Inc. Contact Information 519.221.9132 : Web Contact webmaster@whitehats.ca