Search-Lite: Saving you time & money META

<Meta> Tags

This document assumes that you have some understanding of HTML and web design. We can add META tags to sites which are maintained and hosted by Nimbus, however we recommend that you check out Nimbiz.com where you can manage your entire web site through a simple web based interface.

META-tags are lines of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) at the start of a page's source code. META-tags are not visible to the visitor of your web page, but it will assist many of the major search engines in finding and identifying your files and site information.

A search engine will usually do this by looking at the content of your web page. With META-tags you have more control over the way that a search engine interprets your web page, and you can also add valuable information to a page that may not contain much text within it's main body.

There are several types of META-tag that serve various purposes, but the two most important are the the 'Description' META-tag, and the 'Keyword' META-tag. Lets look at the basics.

Where are META-tags placed ?

The META-tags should be listed immediately following the <TITLE> line. The source code should look something like this.

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>the page name goes here</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="description goes here">
<META name="keywords" content="first keyword,second keyword">
</HEAD>

The 'Description' META-tag.

A search engine will usually take the first 150 characters of your web page, and use this as the description of your site. This is what the user will see when your site is listed in their results. This can cause problems if you have either a graphically intensive site, with very little text, or a page that contains 150 characters or more of JavaScript at the beginning of it's source code.

The description META-tag will allow you to choose exactly what you want the search engine to display when your site appears within the results. An example of source code would resemble ...

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Fred Bloggs Constructions</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Building for the Future !">
</HEAD>

The description should therefore appear within the search engine results ...

Fred Bloggs Constructions
Building for the Future !

The 'Keyword' META-tag.

Keywords are the words that the user enters into the search engine in order to find your site. The keyword META-tag can contain up to 1000 characters, but each individual keyword must be separated by a comma. The source code including keywords would resemble ...

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Fred Bloggs Constructions</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Building for the Future !">
<META name="keywords" content="builder,painter,odd jobs">
</HEAD>

If someone was to search for either builder, painter OR odd jobs, your site would therefore be one of the sites selected.

Please contact us for further tips on META-tags.

PLEASE NOTE :

This page is just an introduction to the benefits of good META-tags. However all of the search engines treat your web pages in different ways. We have perfected the art of META-tagging and bespoke web page registration over many years. If you feel that you would like professional help with the META-tagging of your company please contact us.

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