Ok, 66.33333...% false title (so sue me - but be forewarned I'm broke -- taking all job offers though!:-) - there are no lions or tigers in today's article but YES there are definitely spiders... No, not the creepy crawling, bug eating, you want to squash kind, but the site indexing, you want to be friends with kind - to those whom I have lost I'm talking about Search Engine Spiders (sheesh, and you call yourself webmasters?!!?)
I'm not going to start from scratch on this and explain all the details of basic Meta Tags and spiders - there are already several other articles of this kind - just search for them. Today I'm going to go a step further than the:
<head>
(and get your sleazy mind out of the gutters on that one!)
<META name="description" content="Description
of Site.">
<META name="keywords" content="keywords,of,site">
</head>
Before going any farther, let me just give you a staggering figure:
As of November 2001, only about 28% of the sites use the basic meta tags (see above) and (have seen no number on this) but I would say less than 1% of sites are using these expanding meta tags I am going to give and explain to you. And people wonder why their sites are having difficult times in some of the search engines.
EXTRA: EXTRA: EXTRA: Before going on, I decided to add an extra bonus to all my articles I write from now on (nope, I'm not talking about spell checking them - I'm just to damn lazy - ya'll just have to get use to my eccentric bad speelllings and bad sentence structures!). These bonuses will be for the people who read my soapboxes - they will come in the form of (all for FREE!) marketing ideas, flash games, site ideas (I'm too broke to try these, so let someone else make the millions of dollars of them - though you can send me any percentage of profits!!!) and more. So without further ado...
FREE IDEA
#1: Offline Marketing ~ License Plates
For those who have read my first article
on offline marketing - and thanks to the several people who emailed
me about the article (take that Mrs. Stevens who said my writing
sucked in 11th grade English!) - here is another one: PROMOTION
USING LICENSE PLATES
You see them everywhere, everyday (don't they suck in traffic jams??) - so why not use them for getting traffic to your site? (Rhetorical question so please don't answer aloud!)
License plates can have up to 7 letters (I believe) so most websites would be useless with this - BUT if you come up with three letters/numbers then a space and then add COM (NET, ORG) (7 spaces in all) onto the end and register that license plate (and URL) it will get some people to go to your site to see what the hell it is. Once you get the license plate (and URL - must have both) take a piece of black tape and cut it into a circle to place between the three first letters and the COM (NET, ORG) -- example E4S (black circle tape) COM and the license plate will look like E4S.COM
I know this URL doesn't make sense - its not suppose to - just have the index page to this URL refresh (or better yet reroute) to your main site you want to promote! Tricky huh?
Ok, back to the Meta Tags and spiders (sorry, still no lions and tigers here)!
The following are additional Meta Tags you should include on every page (unless otherwise explained). Please note, all these tags should be between the <Head> </Head> tag. Not all search engines use these extra tags - but they definitely don't hurt to use them though - HINT, HINT, HINT.
<meta
name="revisit-after" content="10 days">
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL">
<meta name="last-modified" content="12-27-01">
<meta name="author" content="info@xxx.com">
<meta name="host" content="www.xxx.com">
<meta name="host-admin" content="info@xxx.com">
<meta name="copyright" content="© 2001
XXX.com. All rights reserved. Material herein is the property
of XXX.com and shall not be reproduced without the written permission
of XXX.com. Copying or duplication of art and/or files is strictly
prohibited. Violators WILL BE PROSECUTED.">
"Revisit-After"
<meta name="revisit-after"
content="10 days">
This tag will ask the search engine spider to revisit your site
after certain number of days. Do not have it every few days or
it WILL be ignored. 10 to 15 days should be fine.
"Robots"
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL"> Robots are actually the search engine spiders. The ALL tells the search engine spider to follow all links in your site to be index. Be careful, even if you don't have a link to your members area, it IS POSSIBLE for the spider to find these pages. To 'Black Flag' the pages (members area pages) you don't want indexed use the following code:
<META
NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
This will tell the spider to not index that page AND not to follow
the links listed on this page. These two codes should be placed
on all of your site pages.
"Last-Modified"
<meta name="last-modified" content="12-27-01">
Search engines send out their spiders sometimes once a week, once a month or every few months. As a simple rule of thumb ALWAYS resubmit your site main pages at least once a month (preferably twice a month). If your site is already indexed the spider still will come to your site. If the site page has not been updated (example - your warning page) then the spider will leave it alone and go elsewhere - not resubmitting it to it's search engine - and thus possibly losing a possible higher ranking.
To have a chance to move up in search engines, at least once a month change SOMETHING on the page and change the last modified date. When the spider comes it will reindex the page since it has changed and it will place the new updated page to be resubmitted (usually getting a tad - not much - but a little higher - though sometimes a lot higher - in that particular engine)
"Author",
"Host", "Host-Admin", "Copyright"
<meta name="author" content="info@xxx.com">
<meta name="host" content="www.xxx.com">
<meta name="host-admin" content="info@xxx.com">
<meta name="copyright" content="© 2001
XXX.com. Copyright info here.">
These tags (#4) are usually useless - just additional info about your site - though I have read DMOZ sometimes hook sites up faster with these expanded tags (can't verify). I usually don't put these on my sites but for past clients I do - only to make myself look intellectuer (is that a word - if not I copyright it!) in their eyes.
You definitely want to add the meta tags "description" and "keyword" to ALL of your pages and these additional tags definitely do not hurt either. Some search engines will give you a boost if you have them. Don't expect to be in the number 1 spot or to even make the top 10 sites list, but it may help you to move from being 539 to 126!
Till my next learning (and part sarcastic) article, Peace Out, D
