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Chapter 12: Using Meta
Tags
Improving Search Engine
Results...
When a search engine finds your page, it will need to index
it (that is, add it to its searchable database) with some
information off the page. Many search engines now support
the <META>
tags, which allow you to give keywords and a description to
your page. This gives you more control over how your page
will show up during a search, and will often cause more
traffic to your page.
The <META>
tag can be used for a few different purposes. Usually, you
should place the <META> tag within the
<head> tags at the
beginning of your document. To improve search engine
results, we will use two specific attributes within the
meta tag. Here is an example:
<meta name="description"
content="description of page goes
here">
<meta name="keywords"
content="keywords go here">
When a user searches a search engine that supports meta
tags and they query a phrase (search for a keyword) related
to your page, your page may show up in the list of results.
Your page will be listed by its Title, and then underneath
its title will be the first hundred or so characters of the
description you placed in the meta tag. It is recommended
that you keep the description content to no more than 200
characters. Although the keywords content is not seen by
the user when searched, it is recommended to keep this less
than 1000 characters, because if you have more the search
engine will either ignore the rest or delete you from the
index. (Spaces are not needed to separate keywords)
Example of a real-life meta situation...
<html>
<head>
<title>Little Joe's Sound Page</title>
<meta name="description" content="Joe's Collection of
Cool Sound files for you to use in your home page!">
<meta name="keywords" content="music sounds midi wav joe
collection">
</head>
<body>
Page Goes Here
</body>
</html>
Meta tags are not visible in the web page unless the user
selects to 'view source'.
Auto-refreshing...
Automatic Refreshing is supported by many newer versions of
Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. This
also uses a modified form of the <META> tag. Auto
refreshing means that once one page loads, you can set a
certain number of seconds and then the browser will load
another page automatically. The basic structure is as
follows:
<meta http-equiv=REFRESH
CONTENT=x_seconds;url="http://www.yourhost.co.za/pagetosendto.html">
The URL is the page you want it to refresh
to, CONTENT is the number of seconds you
want it to wait before refreshing, and
http-equiv=REFRESH just tells it that this
is the refresh meta tag. For example, if you wanted the
page to refresh to sybase.co.za after 5 seconds it would be
as follows:
<meta http-equiv=REFRESH
CONTENT=5;URL="http://www.sybase.co.za/">
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