Search Engines and Directories

Tuning Your Web Pages - the Head

What, nothing on search engines yet? Well, first we need to make certain that your page looks good to a search engine. I know, you've already taken the time to make it look good to humans. Unfortunately, search engine robots will see your page in a completely different way. After all, they're trying to build an index, not admire your graphics. So let's see what a search engine will be looking for.

One word of warning here - I'm going to be talking about your HTML code. For those of you who use WYSIWYG editors, like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, this may come as a bit of a shock. Hang in there, and I'll keep this as simple as I can. However, I can't give you specific instructions for your particular page editing program. There are too many of them, and I just don't have the time to learn everything. Most programs will let you edit the code directly. If you can stand it, just use a text editor (like NotePad or SimpleText) to make these changes. I'll show you how to do this with a minimum of fuss.

If this page looks too hard to you, keep in mind that not all of this is essential. I'll let you know what is important and what you can skip.

The Importance of a Title

I know, you've already given your page a title. We just need to take a look at it from the perspective of a search engine. Go open up your index.htm(l) file in a text editor or HTML editor. You'll only need to look at the top few lines of code. It should look something like this: (Taken from this page, of course.)

The title is up near the top, between the <title> tag and the </title> tag. Now go look at the one on your page. It may not be right at the top like mine is, but it will be somewhere close.

Now let's take a look at what your title contains. Are those keywords from the top of your list in there? If not, it's time to rewrite the title. Keep it short - 20 words or less - but get everything in there. I know, it's a pain, but it's necessary. Remember, this is the first thing that anyone will see in a search listing. If it says "My Home Page", they may not look any further.

Now that you have your title the way you want it, copy it into your word processor on the same page as your keyword list and description. We'll find another use for it later.

Description

Now go take a look at the line just under the title in the example above. Yes, the one that starts <meta name="description".... If you don't already have a line that looks like this, go put one in. You can copy directly from your browser screen, or use View Source and copy from the top of this page (it's the same.) Now go paste that line into your page code, right below the title.

Once you have this line in place, use cut and paste to put the description that you wrote in place of mine. Don't mess up the quotes; they're essential.

Keywords

If you want to skip this section, go ahead. Almost no search engines use the keywords meta tag anymore. Still, it's a good place to store your keywords. Since you put all of that work into coming up with this list, putting it in several places is probably good insurance.

If you want to do this, go take a look at the keywords tag in the example above. Surprisingly enough, it's about keywords. This is the place to put all of the keywords on your list. You can use cut and paste, just like you did for the description. Put all of them in there. This is just for search engines to use; your visitors will never see them. Unless, of course, they snoop into your code using View Source, in which case they deserve what they get. Again, keep the quotes where they are.

Note that there are no spaces after the commas in the example. This is correct. If any search engines do read this, they will only read so many characters (the exact number varies), so putting in unneeded spaces may mean that some of your keywords won't get read. So, unless your list is really short, go back there and get rid of those extra spaces. Leave the spaces between the words in a phrase, though; they really are necessary.

Next:

A few more tricks for the body of your page.