Chapter 81. Adding Keywords and Page Descriptions
| When search engines such as Google and Alta Vista catalog your site, they examine the content of your pages and catalog the particular words and phrases that seem to crop up regularly. When a visitor to google.com or altavista.com searches under, say, shoelaces, there's a good chance that your site appears among the results if you use the word shoelaces on your pages.
What happens if your site is all about shoelaces, but you don't really find yourself using the word that often in the actual running text? This isn't as unlikely a scenario as it might seem. How many times does the work book appear on amazon.com? Not as often as you might think. One way to help search engines catalog your site more accurately is to provide keywords and page descriptions on every page. Keywords are subject headings for the page, while a page description is a short, one-paragraph summary of its content. Your keywords and page descriptions don't display in the browser, so they don't affect the appearance of your pages. That's fine, because you're not adding this information for looks. You're making it as easy as possible for potential visitors to find your site. Use meta tags for the job. Meta tags are special HTML tags that contain general information about the page. These tags go in the head section of an HTML document, along with the page title and any embedded scripts or style sheets. The following block of code shows typical markup for the keywords and description of a page:
In both cases, the meta tag is the same. There isn't a separate keywords tag, in other words, and a separate description tag. Both use the same general meta tag. What distinguishes these types of tags is the name attribute. To create a meta tag for keywords, set the value of the name attribute to keywords. To create a meta tag for the page description, set the value to description. The value of the content attribute becomes either the list of keywords or the description of the page.
Exactly how search engines work depends on the search engine, and the actual procedures are well-kept company secrets. But, in general, the process works something like this. The search engine's robot or Web-sniffing program visits your site and looks at your pages. It compares the keywords and descriptions with the actual content of your pages. If it seems to the robot that your keywords and page descriptions are accurate, it takes them into account when cataloguing your site. However, if the robot suspects that the keywords and descriptions don't match your site's content, it may penalize your site in the search engine's listing. For this reason, be very honest about supplying accurate keywords and descriptions. If you list keywords like shoelaces, laces, and knots, make sure your site doesn't cater to...well, other types of bonds.
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shoes, laced shoes, laces, knots, shopping"> <meta name="description" content="The home page of the world's first full-service, 