SEO – Search Engine Optimization
The art and science of improving a web site’s rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
Crawl
What spiders do - they crawl the web by harvesting links leading from one web page to another in order to discover as many pages as they can.
Link
An image or piece of text that, when clicked on, takes you to another page on the web.
SERPs - Search Engine Results Pages
The pages of results that appear after a search is made.
Algorithm
The secret formula that a Search Engine uses to determine which web pages it will rank for any particular search and in what order those pages will appear in the SERPs.
Page Rank
Google’s measure of the relative value of a web page as compared to all of the other pages on the internet. Page Rank goes from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest.
META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the <head></head> section of your web pages. The keyword metatag element is not currently not considered relevant by the large indexing search engines. Elements containing full sentences are given the most weight. The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.
There are HTML Comments (look for this <!-- Comment Here -->) in the source code to help you understand the metadata elements referenced in this series of topics.
Title Element - Page Titles
Every html document must have a Title Element in the head section. Some refer to the <title> element as a meta tag (title tag) when it is not. <title>META Tags - Metadata Elements</title>
To see an example of where the title element is placed in the html, view the source code of this web page. Look at the very top of the page right after the opening <head> tag.
META Description Tag
Some search engines will index the META Description Tag found in the <head></head> section of your web pages. These indexing search engines may present the content of your meta description tag as the result of a search query. <meta name="description" content="META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements are found within the <head></head> section of your web pages. The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.">
META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that specific page. There have been numerous discussions at various search engine marketing forums surrounding the use of the keywords tag and its effectiveness. The overall consensus is that the tag has little to no relevance with the major search engines today. <meta name="keywords" content="META Tags, Metadata Elements, META Description Tag, META Keywords Tag, Language Tag, Link Relationship Tag, Title Element">
META Language Tag
In HTML elements, the language attribute or META Language Tag specifies the natural language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents. <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">
META Link Relationship Tag
It is helpful for search results to reference the beginning of the collection of documents in addition to the page hit by the search. You may help search engines by using the link element with rel="start" along with the title attribute. The META Link Relationship tag is part of the metadata that appears within the <head></head> section of your web pages. <link rel="start" href="/meta-tags/" title="META Tags - Metadata Elements">
META Robots Tag
The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the /robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and services. <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
META Robots Tag for Googlebot
Googlebot obeys the noindex, nofollow, and noarchive META Robots Tags. If you place these tags in the head of your HTML/XHTML document, you can cause Google to not index, not follow, and/or not archive particular documents on your site. <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive">
META Robots Tag for MSNBot
MSNBot obeys the noindex and nofollow Robots META Tag. Placing these tags in the heading of your HTML document prevents MSNBot from indexing or following specific documents. <meta name="msnbot" content="noindex, nofollow">
META Tags Abuse and Misuse - Metadata Structuring and Standards
This is a search engine marketing article published by our System Admin (Edward Lewis) that discusses the use of HTML Comments Tags and proprietary metadata elements. META Revisit-After Tag
The revisit-after META tag is not supported by any major search engines, it never was supported and probably never will be. It was developed for, and supported by, Vancouver Webpages and their local search engine searchBC. <meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days">
DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
The Dublin Core metadata element set is a standard for cross domain information resource description. <meta name="DC.title" lang="en" content="DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Metadata Initiative">
HTML Comments Tag
HTML comments are not metadata but, are typically found in the <head></head> section of web pages. HTML comments can be utilized anywhere within your documents HTML structure. <!-- HTML Comments (treated as HTML markup) -->
There has been a myth that has perpetuated over the years where keywords and keyword phrases listed inside HTML comments tags would add a boost to the overall relevancy of the page. This is not true based on numerous tests.
