A Meta what?
A meta tag is an element of HTML that often describes the contents of a Web page, and is placed near the beginning of the page's source code. Search engines use information provided in meta tags to index pages, a bit like the dictionary at the top left of every page where it states the first word to the last on the page, and somewhere in between is the word your seek. Meta tags can be more complex, and there are countless sites that go deep into how to create the perfect Meta tag, but we'll try to cover the basics.
Meta tags – hidden text contained in the heading of an HTML page. While they aren’t the answer to why your site isn’t being listed, they are essential. Some search engines ignore Meta Tags but others view Meta Content as highly relevant. To be flippant, say you have a Meta Tag Keyword that says “credit cards” but your site has no relevance to this, the spiders and search engine crawlers are going to throw your page out. They view you as spamming and the powers that be don't like spamming. It’s easy to insert hidden text in Meta Tags that have no relevance to the actual page content, however stick to what you actually have and you'll be better off in the long run.
Meta Description- A mix of the Meta Tags and Title. Most search engines give additional weight to words found in the Title tag if those words are also found in the body text. A Meta Description is an additional place to talk about what you are offering on that specific web site page.
See "We Recommend..." for some excellent sources of information on Meta Tags.
Robots.txt
The Robots META tag is a tag to tell a robot if it's ok to index your
page or not. It's also used to invite a spider to take a stroll down through
all your pages and is of growing importance.
Below is a quick and simple example of a robots.txt.
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To link to it from your pages, type the following into the <HEAD>
tag of your HTML.
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
See "We Recommend..." for some excellent sources of information on Robots.txt files.
Keywords and their importance…
Search engines are Clever!
Search Engines are constantly changing the rules of how to reach the top
20 of their listings. They have to; spammers are flooding them daily with
worthless bits of junk which quickly frustrates the consumer.
A Search engine is all about making money, and they're consumer driven. If a customer does a search on the net for a “Boar bristle brush” and gets hits for “how to hunt and kill a boar”, they're unlikely to use that search engine again. So search engine spiders go out in search for a web site that actually uses meaningful keywords that pertain to the product or item that the consumer is searching for.
Say you have a site that sells time share apartments, and someone does a search for apartments, your site comes up because you have used a keyword or phrase such as "time share apartments" in your web site content. The mistakes are made when people get too greedy with the power of words and think that quantity is important, but quality is paramount.
There are countless sites out there that focus on how to write keywords articles. You can hire someone to do it, or you can do it yourself, but our advice is to get out there and learn. It's not rocket science and you'll pick it up easily enough.
See "We Recommend..." for some excellent sources of information on Keywords.
ALT Tags
Did you know that when Search Engines index your pages they also look
at the Alt Tags for your images? This is why it's important to even have
good descriptive names for your images. Even the spacer image if you use
one! Every little helps!
So why doesn't my site get listed ?
You have to be really patient with this, frustrating as it is. If you're trying to get your site listed on Google via the link Google's addurl feature, it may take 6-8 weeks before your site is actually crawled. Just for your info, this crawl is also known as the "dance".
Plageurism - Did you know that most Search Engines now are clever enough to know if you've copied your content from another site? Don't do this, it's not big and it's not clever and it may result in your page being permanently removed from an index.
Invisible Text - writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by visitors, such as white text on a white page background.
Doorways - setting up pages/links or using cloaking to try to fool search engines into thinking your site is more popular than it actually is may result in permanent removal from an index.
Flash - while flash components are great to look at, they're really all flash and no substance. Search engines do not like them as there's no text behind it. If you use Flash it's important to see text throughout the site in a static format, in other words, have another branch of your site in a standard HTML format. It might not be active and exciting, but the spiders like things that stay still! Google has actually found a way now of crawling a flash site but remember, this is still in it's infancy and may take some time to perfect and anyways don't you want to make some extra cash now?
Frames- this was very popular a few years ago. Frames were designed so that there was to be only one menu bar and people could get to the menu any time they wanted. The draw back to frames is the Search Engines can only read the first frame and not the page that's being listed. Not so good when you have world of text on a page describing your great product and service and it is virtually invisible to the search engines.
JavaScript- this is a cool tool to make your pages look animated and sophisticated. JavaScript drop down menus are great and people love being able to get to the exact page they want without having to peruse the whole site, but Search Engines do not always pick up images. It's therefore important that if you make use of JavaScript for your images that you use text in the format at the same time.
Google Tools - Since Google seems to be the main dude now when it comes to Searching the Internet it's useful to know that they've provided some useful tools for us... You need to enter the commands into the Google search bar.
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