search engines

More information here is available from the W3C's advice on search engines.

There are two main ways by which you can get your page listed on search engines such as AltaVista, Yahoo!, Lycos and Google. The first is - you pay. And the more you pay, the more prominent your listing will be. All very well and good for those large companies which can afford this kind of thing, but they're not the intended "market" of this web site.

So I think it's worth mentioning the second way. Search engines such as Google - which is streets ahead of the competition, really - will, in the first place, return results to the searcher based on the content of the page. Now, technically, you don't need to do anything here. As long as you have used proper text, and not tried presenting text as images (a very good reason not to be guilty of this atrocity), Google should at least acknowledge the existence of your page.

Of course, everyone would like to boost the ranking of their site, as well as just having it seen. The main way Google does this is through links to your site from others, and I've said more about this in the Web Design printed booklet. But you can also use <meta> tags here.

In this case you would use <meta> tags with name rather than http-equiv. You can actually make up your own values for name but the ones shown below are those recognised by search engines. Like other things discussed here, be aware that these are in no way a foolproof way of getting a listing on a search engine, but adding these to your pages won't hurt. This particularly applies if you are using frameset documents as these do not have page content. In those cases you must at least include the name="description" version of the <meta> tag or there is simply nothing for search engines to "see".

• description: This provides a brief description of the contents of your web page. Get to the point quickly, as search engines may only look at the first 20 or so words.

      <meta name="description" content="An online tutorial for
      advanced HTML techniques">

• author, copyright: Both should be fairly self-explanatory.

      <meta name="author" content="Drew Whitworth">
      <meta name="copyright" content="ACOM, University of Leeds">

• keywords: These supplement the description. You can provide a list of comma-separated keywords which may help a search engine to index your document. Note there's no upper limit on the number of key words you can include here. The relevant <meta> tags on this site have around forty keywords in them. However, this does lead to some unscrupulous web designers loading hundreds of mostly irrelevant keywords into their pages in the hope that, say, someone looking for information on photosynthesis will be duped into thinking that "http://www.hotbabes.com/" is something to do with the subject. All this does is sow distrust among the browsing community and along the way make you look at bit silly so I hope, as someone who actually wants to make the WWW a better (not more confusing) place, you won't do this sort of thing.

      <meta name="keywords" content="web design, training,
      intermediate">

• rating: This indicates the appropriateness of your page for children. Some browsers or search engines can now be programmed to restrict access to under-age users. The four available ratings are "general", "mature", "restricted", and "14 years".

      <meta name="rating" content="general">

Note that Google also has an image search facility. This can return some bizarre results, but this is generally because people don't use the alt attribute properly. If you do, this is another way in which people can find your site in preference to anyone else's.

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