So you got this far! You have your very own page on the web, aw
ain't that nice? But how do you announce this fact to the waiting
world? Who's gonna come to the house warming party? Not a sausage
unless you understand how Search Engines
and Meta Tags work.
a.search.engine.a.day.keeps.the.spiders.away!
Spiders, Crawlers, Robots, Walkers, Worms and Wombats - no it's not
the latest Stephen King movie lineup! These are automated programs
- bots - that roam around the web gathering information and indexing
web sites. Each one has been sent on a mission by it's big brother
search engine, 'crawling' or 'spidering'. It may sound a little Sci-Fi
and creepy, but they actually are all for 'truth, justice and the
American way' - the good guys in action.
The way they work is simple - find a page, index it, follow the links
and start all over again. What they do with the information, however,
is specific to each big brother. Let's take a look at the most popular
engines, shall we?
- Alta Vista:
www.altavista.com or www.goeureka.com.au
By far the most powerful in the posse, AV will index the text on
your pages down to 3 levels (homepage, first level link, 2nd level
link). As with all engines, it will periodically visit your site
and reindex what it already knows. However, it is so powerful mainly
due to the fact that it recognises how often your pages change,
and will revisit more often if need be.
- InfoSeek:
www.infoseek.com
Also a 3-level indexer, visiting every 3 weeks.
- Excite:
www.excite.com
Reindexes every 2 weeks. Also is concept based - it looks for words
similar to what may be searched for. Provides individual reviews
of thousands of sites.
- Lycos:
www.lycos.com
Indexes 3 levels every 3 weeks. Slightly different in that it creates
an abstract impression (like a general description) of your site.
- Webcrawler:
www.webcrawler.com
The poor cousin - indexes full text but only 1 level and only once
a month.
- Google
www.google.com
Don't have information on this one but we find ourselves using it
all the time as it gives good results
- Yahoo! or Looksmart:
www.yahoo.com www.looksmart.com.au
Yahoo is a breed unto itself as it works purely via user submissions
and is therefore a little more complicated. You must personally
add your site to whatever categories you deem applicable and a human
editor will review your page. Useful, however in that it creates
expanding categories and regional entries.
When using these engines, take the opportunity to add the URL of
your web site to each one. Remember though, it can take 2-4 weeks
before a search will yield results. If you have money to burn, or
operate a big time business, you can try automated URL-adders such
as Submit-It! These seem okay,
but you don't have individual control about what gets submitted to
each search engine.
keeping.the.engine.on.track
Now you can sit back and relax and let those spiders do all the work
for you, right? WRONG! Sure, the indexing will take place, but will
it be the best - will you be listed high in search results? Not likely
unless we look into a few other matters ...
- Titles : Remember a few lessons ago
we mentioned that the < title > tag gets picked up by crawlers
and included as part of the indexing? Well, that still holds true
- make the title tag of each page meaningful and consider it's relevance
to the content.
- Scripts : If the first thing encountered
on a page is created using Javascript or the like, some browsers
may record this as being part of the content, or push the real content
further down. Try to avoid scripts appearing as the very first thing
at the top of HTML documents. Don't confuse the poor dears!
- Mixers : For concept based searchers,
try to avoid mixing content on a page.
- Tables : Tables are great, but they
can also squidge text further down a page
- ImageMaps : Can cause similar problems
to scripts. Try the magical meta tag on these pages. AND, remember
we also discussed what to do for those people who 'switch off' graphics
when browsing - add text links at the bottom of the screen. Well,
this is also useful for search engines that get confused with imagemaps!
They can follow the yellowbrick links! Ditto goes for frames.
- Alt Tags : Some crawlers include the
ALT tag descriptions (see previous lesson!) so keep this in mind
metaphorical.meta.tags
Alta Vista & InfoSeek make great use of the Meta Tag -
which should be inserted within the < head > tags at the top
of html documents. What is it? It's a special HTML tag that lets you
insert relevant information specific to you and your beloved page,
and can specify keywords not directly in the text itself. Here's how
-
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="ReTroGrrl">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Retro City - Space Cadet Astro
lessons in html">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Retro City, Australia, Space,
Cadets">
It's really that simple, but it does take some aforethought.
Go away now and linger over this lesson - and look forward to next
time when we discuss tumultuous tables!
