A web page, when published on a host, is indexed by
search engines. Programs called spiders or crawlers follow links through the
internet, going where the connections offered take them. When they come to a
site, they list and sort the text and especially the links they find on it.
They also recognise a site by its attributes. If you are using specialist
web software, you see these when you edit the Page Properties. If you use
word, you will have to insert them as html tags. If you want to see an
example of what they look like in html, see Appendix 1. These are what are
often called the meta tags. They look frightening, but there is an easy way
of generating them for your site. Type something like “free meta tag
generator” into a search engine and the system will create the tags for you
so that you can copy the html code onto your page. (Be sure you are in html
mode when you do this.) But there are things you have to provide before even
the free generators can do their job. First you have to decide what to
include under each of the headings below. Finally, if you type something
like “meta tag advice” into a search engine and read a couple of articles
you will get an idea of what to include and what not to include in the tags
below.
Keywords
These are the words that will be used by search engines
to index your site. Keywords are individual words or sometimes phrases
separated by commas. Take a look at the keywords I have used for my site in
Appendix 1. I have used a lot, probably too many. But my advice would be to
use words and phrases drawn from three areas:
a)Yourself. In my case, spires, Spires, Philip, Philip, Philip Spires,
philip spires, philipspires etc Notice how I have included the website name
philipspires as a keyword.
b)Your book. Include the title, relevant place names, character names,
content indicators, etc
c)Publisher and general information. Include Libros International in
the keywords and general terms referring to the book’s genre, style or
target audience.
Title
The Title tag does exactly what you would expect. Write
a sentence to describe and summarise the entire site. Be sure to use some of
the words from the keywords you have chosen. Do not write gibberish,
however, or stuff the sentence with keywords. Keep it sensible and write for
people not machines.
Description
This should be a short paragraph to expand on and
provide more detail on the website and its contents. Again use the keywords
regularly, but write in sentences.
Word file with contents
An essential thing to do when you have decided on your
keywords, title and description is to create a word processor file with the
text you have chosen. Save it as something like “Mysitemetatags” so that you
can find it easily. When you are doing the linking work later on you will
often be asked to provide a site description, title and keywords. Having
them stored in a word processor file means that you can easily access them,
that they can be copied and pasted each time to avoid typing errors and,
crucially, that they will match up with the ones you have on the website to
assist indexing and linking.
