SEARCH
ENGINE META TAGS
When you submit your web site to the search engines for indexing in their database, it is important that your store pages include "Meta
Tags". These tags are specially formatted commands that are hidden in the HTML of the store page. Search engines look for these hidden commands and use them for indexing your store's pages.
Note: these tags must be formatted properly in order for the store page function properly and to be indexed by the search engines.
Short
Meta Tag Tutorial
Here is an example of a Meta Tag "block" that could be inserted into this field:
Meta Tags won't guarantee a good placement in the search engines, but they are now used by all except one major search engine. So if you are not using
Meta Tags, you are simply limiting your ability to get a good listing in the various search engines.
NOTE: some webmasters and designers still believe that search engines cannot read and index "dynamic" web pages like those generated by this store's software. This is no longer a true statement since more and more search engines now read and index dynamic web pages. Example: go to www.AltaVista.com and search for "index.asp". The extensions ".asp" (as well as ".pl" and ".cgi") are used by various programming languages to generate dynamic web pages. You can see by the search results that dynamic web pages are indeed included in the database.
Placement of Meta Tags
META tags should always be placed in the head of the HTML document between the actual <HEAD> tags, before the BODY tag.
When you enter properly formatted Meta Tags into the field above, the store will automatically insert them into the proper location on all the various skin pages (when they displayed for processing by the search engines.)
These tags will be hidden in the HTML and will not be seen by your customers.
Useful
Meta Tags
The
META description attribute allows you to add your own description:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This page is about friendship, love, sharing, and achieving balance in your life.">
Use between
60 - 130 characters, and make sure that you include several of your keywords in the description.
Keywords are very important since it is through them that people will find your site.
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="life, friendship, relationships, love, sharing, balance, happiness, harmony">
Use up to 800 characters and put the most important keywords as close to the top of your page as possible. By the way, don't think you can "spike" the keywords by using the same word repeated over and over, as most search engines have refined their spiders to ignore such a tactic. Instead, use each keyword only once (include both singular and plural forms if appropriate). Some search engines may require that the keywords be entered in all UPPER CASE letters.
<META
NAME="robots" CONTENT="all,none,index,noindex,follow,nofollow">
The default for the robot attribute is "all". This would allow all of the files to be indexed. "None" would tell the spider not to index any files, and not to follow the hyperlinks on the page to other pages. "Index" indicates that the spider may index this page, while "follow" would mean that the spider is free to follow the links from this page to other pages. However, "noindex" would tell the spider not to index this page, but would allow it to follow the links and index those pages.
"nofollow" would allow the page itself to be indexed, but the links could not be followed.
As you can see, the robots attribute can be very useful.
You can also specify the distribution of your pages for indexing. It can be global, or restricted to certain countries.
<META NAME="distribution" CONTENT="Global">
To help the robots classify your site, you have the possibility of assigning
a rating for your pages:
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="General">
If you are making revisions to your site or updating frequently, it is helpful to ask the robots to revisit your site after a certain time. It is recommended that you use a time frame between 3 weeks to 6 months.
<META NAME="revisit after" CONTENT="30days">
For more information about the many types of Meta Tags, please visit your favorite search engine and search for "meta tag tutorial". Here are some sites that provide useful information regarding Meta Tags:
http://www.philb.com/metatag.htm
http://www.webdeveloper.com/html/html_metatags.html
http://www.htmlprimer.com/metatags.shtml
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html
http://jimworld.com/metatag2.html
http://www.northernwebs.com/set/setsimjr.html
http://www.northernwebs.com/set/
http://www.iprimus.ca/~iwb/search_engine/killer.html
http://gomasonry.com/webmaster/meta_tutorial.html
http://pandecta.com/search_engines/meta_tags_mistakes.html
