Hantsweb Technical Guidelines
META tags
Meta tags are what many search engines use to catalogue your web pages and respond to a search engine query. Their purpose is to give information about your web page to the search engine. The two parts to META tags which are useful are, description and keywords.
Description
The description tag defines the text that some search engines display after your site has been selected through a keyword search. For example the description for our Titanic page is: "Titanic page focusing on the connections with Southampton, plus lots of RMS Titanic links."
Keywords
Keywords are entered into a search engine to search for information - the keyword META tag gives words to the search engine. For example on our web page for the Titanic the keywords are: "Titanic, RMS, White Star Line, Southampton, maritime, historical, visit"
META tags are a useful tool but some guidelines should be adhered to before you put them on all your pages.
- Do not repeat words - some search engines treat this as spamming
- Ensure you have focused your keywords to reflect your pages - try to limit your keywords to seven words.
- Always place your META tags above the SSI comment
Not all directories and search engines honour META tags, but the vast majority do so they are worth using on your pages.
Inserting META tags
The best way to insert a META tag is directly into the HTML code. The META tags should always be inserted within the <HEAD> tag.
Place you cursor between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tag. The most suitable place will be after the <TITLE> </TITLE> tags.
Firstly insert the description tag:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT=" insert your description here - try not to exceed 200 characters ">
Then the keyword tag:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT=" insert you keywords here, separate each one with a comma. Rank your keywords in order of importance, with the highest first - try not to exceed seven keywords ">
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