Lots of people commenting on the last post in this Blog 101 series wanted to know about meta tags. In order to talk about web pages and meta tags, it's necessary to understand a small amount of HTML and the structure of a web page. Don't worry! I know how scary programming or code-looking stuff can be, so I will keep it basic. Some commenters may get on my case for not including CSS or teaching you do do a blog. They're right in theory, but I would rather have you learn a few key things about search engines than become a programmer.
Parts in Bold are my comments. Brackets like this <> and </> start and end HTML code, but you won't have to use them yourself. All this will start to become clear as we work through this example. So without further ado, here's the hidden part at the start of a web page.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> This matters, but not to you
<html> Every web page starts with this
<head> The announcement of the beginning of actual content.
<title>Anywhere Subdivision - Anywhere US - HOA Docs and Real Estate News </title> <---Very Important
Title is the first of the very important content to think about. This is what shows up at the top of the
window displaying your page. Because it's what you name your page for the world to see, Google, Yahoo,
and the other search engines consider this to be important. So should you.
If you notice the content I created after the <title>, I name my subdivision, name the town,
and use "real estate". That will clearly indicate to the search engines that someone looking for
"anywhere subdivison real estate" should find me. First...
<meta name="description" content="Anywhere Subdivision in Anywhere, State consists of some homes
and some lots in an area of any quality schools.">
<meta name="keywords" content="Anywhere Subdivision, Anywhere State, Anywhere Subdivision real estate,
homes for sale, HOA docs, CCR">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
Meta, Meta, Meta...The lines starting with "<meta name" are meta tags. Each tells the browser
and search engines something about the content. The first two tags show "meta name=description" and
"meta name=keywords". In plain english "<meta name=description" is supposed to be a twenty-five word
or less summary of the page. It's where you establish the reason for the page and use your best writing.
"<Meta name=Keywords" as a meta tag is a non-sentence list of all the keywords that appear on the page
and are relevant to the content. Don't use keywords that aren't on your page, and tempting as it might be,
don't use your competitor's name on your page either. It works, but it's not kosher. You can repeat keywords
as parts of different combinations as I have done here, but Google watches for over-use.
</head> The announcement of the end of the preliminary and non-displayed content
=====
In order to keep these posts a manageable size, I'm going to finish the discussion of the first page for our neighborhood web site tomorrow. The key concepts for today are
- Clear and descriptive title
- Powerfully written meta tag for description
- Thorough use of meta keywords to identify your city, neighborhood, subdivision, real estate affilitation, interests, etc.
- Repetition of key words and phrases everywhere to get high keyword density (see below)
If you look again at the non-bold text in the title and meta tag sections you will notice my use of repetition. You'll see it again in the next post in the body copy and headlines. The search engines are good at trying to sort out pages that are important, and when you give them high "keyword density" for your important words, they will rank your page accordingly. By keyword density, I simply mean the word or words are repeated many times in different places. You can overdo it, of course, but when this page is done it will have a keyword density for "anywhere subdivision" that will be in the 5% range. That's where I want to be.
Because you have learned some new things today, I wanted to show you how to look at web pages with your new understanding. Do a google search for your town's real estate and pull up the site ranked #1. Your browser has a command under the VIEW menu called "Source" or "Page Source". That command will expose the HTML of the page and with your new knowledge you can look at their <title> and <meta> sections to see what they have done to start getting a good Google ranking. Then have a look at your own site with the view source or view page source command to see where you can start improving.
More later
Dave Roberts
;)
;)
OK - so now I'm a little more familiar with the terminology. I still don't quite get it so I'll be tuning later in for more. Thanks for the lesson!