| Meta Tags
Before you submit your site to search engines, you should be certain that you have included "meta tags" in at least one of your html pages, typically your home page.
| Meta tags are an important aspect of site promotion. Many search engines use spiders, sometimes referred to as robots, to "visit" and "index" your site. The spiders make a complete "sweep" of the internet every 2 to 3 weeks, constantly updating the search engine database. These spiders will normally use the first text they recognize in a given html document as the description of that page in their listing. |  | 
AltaVista "robot," Scooter |
Meta tags allow you to control the resulting description that will appear in search engine results when your page is listed.
The most important meta tags are those for "description" and "keywords." The tags are placed after the closing </TITLE> tag and before the closing </HEAD> tag.
Example of meta tag placement in a typical html page:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> websitelabels.com </TITLE>
< META Name="description" Content="Inexpensive and free ways to promote your web site">
< META Name="keywords" Content="web site promotion services, promotional products, advertising specialties">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
The description meta tag is exactly what it implies — a description of your site. These are the words a search engine will display in its results pages for your site, along with the page's URL. You should not exceed 200 characters of text in your description. |
| Keywords
Keywords are words which describe the content of your site. Keywords should not exceed 1000 characters and should be separated by commas. Do not repeat the same word more than 7 times in your keyword list, otherwise the entire list will be ignored by the robot. A standard trick for developing keywords is to visit AltaVista or InfoSeek and do a search using keywords which you feel are relevant to your web site. You should then visit the sites which get a high ranking in the search results and view their source document to see what keywords they are using.
How to view the source of a web page:
| Netscape: | from the Main Menu: View ---> Page Source |
| Explorer: | from the Main Menu: View ---> Source |
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| Doorway Pages
Sometimes referred to as gateway pages or leader pages, doorway pages are short introductory pages which are optimized to get high rankings in search engines. These pages are designed to exist in addition to your "real" home page. Ideally, there should be at least one separate gateway page created specific to each search engine since each search engine uses different methods to determine relevancy.
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