Web Design Fall 2008
Class Materials
Meta Tags Meta tags are used to store information about your site that is not visible when viewing your homepage. The most common uses for meta tags is in search engine optimization. You can use meta tags to store descriptions, key-words, and more so that search engines push users to your site when they are searching for products or services you provide. Understanding Keywords Keyword Searching This is the most common form of text search on the Web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords. What is a keyword, exactly? It can simply be any word on a webpage. For example, I used the word "simply" in the previous sentence, making it one of the keywords for this particular webpage in some search engine's index. However, since the word "simply" has nothing to do with the subject of this webpage (i.e., how search engines work), it is not a very useful keyword. Useful keywords and key phrases for this page would be "search," "search engines," "search engine methods," "how search engines work," "ranking" "relevancy," "search engine tutorials," etc. Those keywords would actually tell a user something about the subject and content of this page. Unless the author of the Web document specifies the keywords for her document (this is possible by using meta tags), it's up to the search engine to determine them. Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that appear to be significant. Since since engines are software programs, not rational human beings, they work according to rules established by their creators for what words are usually important in a broad range of documents. The title of a page, for example, usually gives useful information about the subject of the page (if it doesn't, it should!). Words that are mentioned towards the beginning of a document (think of the "topic sentence" in a high school essay, where you lay out the subject you intend to discuss) are given more weight by most search engines. The same goes for words that are repeated several times throughout the document. Some search engines index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document. Full-text indexing systems generally pick up every word in the text except commonly occurring stop words such as "a," "an," "the," "is," "and," "or," and "www." Some of the search engines discriminate upper case from lower case; others store all words without reference to capitalization. The Problem With Keyword Searching Keyword searches have a tough time distinguishing between words that are spelled the same way, but mean something different (i.e. hard cider, a hard stone, a hard exam, and the hard drive on your computer). This often results in hits that are completely irrelevant to your query. Some search engines also have trouble with so-called stemming -- i.e., if you enter the word "big," should they return a hit on the word, "bigger?" What about singular and plural words? What about verb tenses that differ from the word you entered by only an "s," or an "ed"? Search engines also cannot return hits on keywords that mean the same, but are not actually entered in your query. A query on heart disease would not return a document that used the word "cardiac" instead of "heart." Creating a Keyword List When coming up with a keyword list you want to make sure your list will apply to all the different search engines and that your list is as inclusive yet specific as possible. Lets take the example of this website. The overall topic for the site is a Website Design class in Jackson Hole wyoming. These words are the basis for my keyword list. Now I am going to go through each of them individually and create a list with all of their synonyms.
I will also create a list of phrases that I would like included in my keywords as well
Now we can combine all these keywords into one long stretch that has commas separating the values. The list would look like this
Useful Links Meta Tag Generator: http://www.htmlbasix.com/meta.shtml This website goes through the basic meta tags that you should always use on every website. Meta Tag library: http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/ This is a listing of almost all the meta tags you can imagine! Google Webmaster Guidelines: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 this site offers basic guidelines to help search engines find your site and index it correctly. Google add URL: this link will take you to a page where you can submit a website domain to be added to google search indexes. http://www.google.com/addurl Once you have completed your website and set it up to be hosted on a server you will want to fill out this page and submit your site to google. |