Helping Search Pages Catalog Your Page


Most folks who publish a Web page want it found by everybody online who may have a remote interest in the page's topic. (If you intend to keep the Web page you're creating a big, fat secret, you can skip this part.)

Obviously, the key to exposing yourself is to ensure that the page shows up in the major (and minor) search pages, such as Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), Excite (www.excite.com), and AltaVista (www. altavista .com). If your page is about duck diseases, you want to be sure that whenever anyone enters the search term "sick duck," "duck illness ," or "shaggy beak," a link to your page will appear high in the list of results.

In some cases, you must manually register your page with a search tool or use a Web promotion service to do it for you. But many search pages catalog the contents of the Web automatically. These search pages use programs, sometimes called crawlers or spiders, that roam around the Web, give Web pages a quick glance, and then attempt (with varying success) to automatically assign each page to one or more related categories. The more accurately your pages are categorized by these programs, the more likely they are to be found by exactly the folks you want to attract .

The most important step in ensuring that the spiders categorize a page correctly is giving it a good, descriptive title, as described earlier in this chapter (all spiders look at page titles). But in Composer, you can increase the accuracy with which you'll be categorized by typing a brief Description in the Page Properties dialog box (Format, Page Title and Properties).

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Besides title and description, there are two other ways you can describe your page to search engines, helping those engines do a better job of leading visitors to your pages: Keywords and Classification.

  • Keywords are any important terms with which your page might be associated. For example, the site for a reptile store might use the keywords pet, reptile, snake, herp, lizard , turtle , tortoise, etc. Think of words visitors might enter as search terms when seeking a site like yours; those are your keywords.

  • Classification is a category or class in which your site belongs: Shopping, business, recreation, and so on.

To add keywords and/or a classification to your site, type them in the boxes provided on the General tab of the Page Properties dialog (refer to Figure 19.2). As directed on the dialog box, type a comma between each keyword in the Keywords box, or between multiple classifications in the Classification box. (In both boxes, insert dashes between multi-word terms; for example, reptile-store could be one keyword.)

Many spiders read the description and regard the words in it as clues to the page's proper category. If your page is about bicycles, including a description that contains words like bicycle, bike, cycling, cycle, cyclist, Huffy , and so on may increase the chances that those interested in cycling find your page through searches.

Also, when a search turns up your page, many search engines display the description along with the link to your site. A well-worded description helps ensure that folks who will be interested in your site get there.



Sams Teach Yourself Internet and Web Basics All in One
Sams Teach Yourself Internet and Web Basics All in One
ISBN: 0672325330
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 350
Authors: Ned Snell

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