MetaTags & Search Engines
PMACo Policy
Directive 991111djh
You'll hear a lot of hype about "rising
to the top of a Search Engine Search list" and how vital this is to your e-commerce
business. Although important, Search Engines are only a very small part of your
overall marketing strategy in promoting your site. PMA Consulting definitely subscribes
to the policy of making webpages easier for Search Engines to find and tabulate,
but we DO NOT promote, nor even condone the use of tricks and/or subterfuge to "bouy
the float" of a site or page.
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The evolution of the World Wide Wait
into "The Net" is heavily dependent on highly effective daemons dedicated
to sifting and collating the truly unimaginable amount of information available
on the Internet today, leave alone the amount of data that will be available a bit
further along in this evolution. What we have now, in Google,
Lycos, InfoSeek,
AskJeeves, Mamma,
and Netscape, though nice, is woefully inadequate
to the task of supplying us usable arrays of "hits" and attempts to circumvent
this existing system will only slow progress toward the ultimate goal of a daemon
that will "Grep the world!" We really need this tool now, and our need
of it is only going to grow as the evolution of "The Net" continues, so
try to behave yourself when building your MetaTags, okay?
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MetaTags are the index that most
daemons use to collate and present an array of data to the person using the Search
Engine to find something. Of course, that means they're also the best target for
abuse by people that want their site to be on the top of every search anyone does
for anything, so they cut and paste the Webster's Dictionary list into their MetaTag
entry and waste drive space, bandwidth, people's patience and require webmaster's
to devote energy to patching the daemon against this abuse that could be devoted
to developing a better daemon. We don't do that here and if you want to grow up
and be a good Netizen (citizen of 'TheNet'), you won't do it yourself, nor will
you condone others use of this practice.
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Okay, enough of the lambasting, here's
what we DO do. We DO definitely make a MetaTag entry for every page that we publish.
I learned this little trick from my favorite webmaster's resource and highly recommended
site, The BigNoseBird! All
pages should include the following MetaTags.
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<META NAME="Author"
CONTENT="Doug Hood - PMA Consulting">
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This first tag goes just under the
"<Meta Name="Hpp"
Content="V=2.1 L=B Ecp=1004 Dcp=850 Lid=1-649"> that HomePage Publisher puts into all the pages I produce,
since you probably won't have this referrent, just put it between the "<head>
and </head> tags somewhere. This entry isn't so much vital as it is courteous.
It's nice to let people know who wrote the material they're reading and it's equally
nice to give credit where credit is due the author.
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<META NAME="description"
CONTENT="PMA Consulting helps PC Users, PC User Groups and small businesses
to network with each other, the internet, other groups and other businesses in as
affordable and secure a manner as possible.">
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This tag follows the "author"
tag and I consider to be absolutely vital. A search engine daemon will use this
entry to synopsize the whole page or site that you're presenting. Again, brevity
is a *GOOD* thing here. PMAco's policy is that this entry be limited to 50 words
or less.
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<META NAME="keywords"
CONTENT="PMAco975seSandyBv, time, security, safety, network, hacker, cracker,
crack, virtue, value, gotcha">
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"Keywords" is the fuel
upon which most Search Engines run, as such, carefully choosing them is an excellent
investment of your energy in webpage development. Again, brevity is a virtue here,
tight code is good code, wasted motion is an abomination, etc. PMAco's policy is
again, no more than 50 words and in addition, ALL the keywords must be found in
the text of the page. The only exceptions to this policy are the "PMAco975seSandyBv"
and "gotcha" which always bracket the real keywords in my HTML. Paul Rogers
turned me on to this little trick of embedding a "nonsense" word into
MetaTags to give me an index of how well I'm penetrating the daemon's databases.
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<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing"
content="TRUE">
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"MSSmartTags" is a new
legacy from our favorite software company to hate. The gist is that Internet Exploder
interprets keywords in our pages and "inserts" links to MSN approved sites
so that people browsing can "get more information" about this from Microsoft's
customers. I found out about this wonderful new feature from the link:
http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/evil_smarttags.htm
Webmasters can keep smart tags from working on their site by including a special
"opt-out" metatag in the header of each and every page. I highly recommend
that all webmasters include this tag to prevent smart tags from operating.
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<Meta Name="ROBOTS"
Content="ALL">
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This tag just tells the Webspyders
to scan all the HTML on the page.
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<Meta Name="revisit-after"
Content="14 days">
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This tag just tells the spyders to
check back in a couple of weeks for any changes.
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<Title>PMA Consulting
index of Services</Title>
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You guys, DON'T not put in a title.
That's really sloppy coding and it's an embarassment to experienced internauts.
The "revisit" line is the end of my MetaTags and it's just above the title
line.
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