Your website may look pretty, but does it look good to the search engine ‘spider’. Spiders (sometimes called ‘Bots’) have been crawling around the Internet for years. Their job is to find and report on all the gazillion websites.
Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others all have their own spiders and each one works slightly differently. If these spiders accurately assess your website it will lead to enhanced rankings and, clearly, search results for your end users.
There are dozens of “meta tags” available, but here is a short list of the ones you may want to review for your site. Meta information is not visible to a website visitor, but is included in the HTML code and visible by ‘Viewing the Source’ of a webpage.
This is the one you hear about all the time. You want to create a list of 30 to 40 words or word combinations that you think people will use when searching for your services. People typically search with two or three word combinations and will often include a location keyword – “Bellingham horse training” for example.
Your description is what will show up in the search results so it is essential it is well written and clear. It should be three to five sentences and include many of the same words you used as keywords.
This meta tag gives you control over how the spiders interact with your website. The above tag, for example, will tell the spider to index or list the page, but not to follow any of the links within the page.
This meta tag will turn off the little image toolbar that appears when someone hovers over an image on your website. I like to remove it so users are not distracted when looking at our company logo.
You may need to contact your web developer to help you implement these meta tags, but either way each will help enhance your website’s presence on the Internet.
Copyright © 2008 The NW Horse Source, LLC
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