Newsletter Archive

Welcome to The Internet 800 Directory Newsletter. It's the Friday before the last holiday of the summer. I don't know about the rest of the country, but it's been a hot dry summer here and I'm looking forward to some cooler weather.

If you have a good understanding of Meta headers and how they work, you don't need to read anymore of this weeks newsletter and we'll see you next week.

Last week I talked about putting together key words for your web site. Now that you have a good set of key words, we need to add them to your web site. One of the most overlooked features in a lot of web sites is Meta Headers. Meta headers will ensure that search engines properly index your site. Meta header are not magic, you may have the best meta headers in the world, but meta headers alone will not significantly raise the ranking of your website if it lacks good content.

There are two basic types of web sites that help you find what you need on the web: search engines and directories. Directories tend to be a manual entry database system. Under this system you enter the information into a form and it is added to the directory's database. This is how the Internet 800 Directory works. You add your listing and we check it and post it to the database and appear in our directory. This type of directory only has the information you supply when filling out the form.

With search engines you provide the web address and then they send out a program to collect information about your site. This program can be called a spider, bot or crawler but they all do the same thing. They index your site for the database of the search engines. It is this indexing that determines how and where your site will appear in the search engines. When most spiders visit your site they follow every link and collect information on every page in your site. There are ways to ask the spiders not to index pages. If this is of interest, let me know and I will cover it at another time.

What are Meta headers and how are they used? Most search engines use the location and frequency of keywords on a web page for ranking its return. The exact mechanism is slightly different for each engine. Some search engines support the Meta description and Meta keywords tags. By using these tags you can place your key words and site description into your web site for the spiders to index.

If you have your web site up and don't know if you have Meta headers in your site, go to your web page on the top bar of your browser click on view, then click on view source. The Meta headers are placed in between and in your HTML code at the top of your web page.

Meta Description Header

The size of the Meta description header should be under 200 characters. This description must tell the reader what they will find on the website. The html format of the meta description tag is;

Meta Keywords Header

The keywords header is used by the Meta capable search engines to aid them in indexing your site. The search engines use this information to determine under what queries your website will be seen. The basic html format of the Meta keyword header is:

Now that we have the proper words in your web site for the spiders to find, next week I will talk about boosting your placement in the returns and the dangers of the search engines removing you for what they call spam.

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