How do the Meta tags work? And where should they go in the code?

Is it worth putting in the keywords, as i have read the description tag is where the search engines will look.

Many thanks
Maggie

Hi Maggie,

Technically, META tags should be between the HEAD tags in your document. If you have your cursor flashing in the Design view of your page, and insert a META tag, Dreamweaver usually inserts the META tag in the correct place, between the HEAD tags.

The META tags are used to inform 'readers' as to what the document contains. A reader can be browser software such as Internet Explorer, a search engine such as Google or even an operating system such as Windows.

For example, the first META tag below indicates the content of the file is plain text/html code, with a specific character set. The second META tag indicates the language of the file is English (US). Readers can use this information to assist in correctly displaying the web page.
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">

The Keywords and Description META tags used to be very important to web site developers because it was how search engines categorised and sorted web sites according to what people were searching for.

However, because there are now so many web sites out there, often discussing similar topics, search engines have to be much more clever about how they return their results to their visitors. Search engines do not give as much weight of importance to these two META tags now. Rather, they look at the page as a whole, and what other web sites are linking to it ("incoming links").

Just to be safe, I would still recommend entering a description indicating what each web page is discussing, and also entering some key-words (or key-terms) you think your visitors would type in a search engine to find your page.

Regards, Rich

Hi Rich,

Thanks for your reply it did answer my question.

I have published 1 page on my site, while I am developing the rest of the website. But the search engines are not picking it up, is this not an instant process? it is not picking up the address even though it's on the meta tags and written on the page.

Thanks
Maggie

Maggie,

No, it certainly isn't an instant process. It could take days, weeks, months. Usually a week or two though. But keep in mind that most search engines do not guarantee they will list you.

The best thing you can do for initial exposure is ask some other web sites to link to you. If any of your friends, family or colleagues have web sites that are listed in search engines, ask them to create a link on one of their pages to your site (and ensure the link is working!) Search engines will then visit their site, follow the 'external link' to your site and start 'crawling' your web site too.

For the Google search engine, I highly recommend Google's webmaster tools which allows you to check if you are indexed in Google, and also submit your URL for inclusion. Even then, they don't guarantee you'll be listed, but it's a good start. Check out the other webmaster tools while you're there.

Regards, Rich