1. A Brief Digression on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2. Search Engine Optimization Search Engines use the visible content on a webpage as well as some information hidden from the reader to direct people to the desired pages. Thus it is useful to include some of this information.

3. Title A page’s title does appear in the browser. If nothing else the title-tag contents will be used to display the search engine’s results.

4. Meta-tags HTML allows for meta-tag elements in the head. They have no effect on the page’s content or on how the page is displayed. Their purpose is to supply additional information used by search engines for example. Some meta-tags have been abused in the past and it is not clear that they are used by search engines.

5. Keywords There are a few standard values for a meta-tag’s name attribute, one being “keywords”. For example Keywords has been abused and may have become less important. However, –Have it –Keep it short –Don’t repeat words (or variations on words)

6. Description Another standard is the description meta-tag as shown above. The description should be brief and should correlate with the keywords. –Don’t repeat words within the keywords meta-tag, –But do use your keywords in the description. –Correlate description with page’s title and possibly the content of header tags.

7. Other meta-tags There are other meta-tags and the claim is that they are not used by the likes of Google and Yahoo but may be used by special purpose search engines. For example,

8. Links Some search engines are based on “spiders” that “crawl” the web following all of the links. A measure of a page’s importance is how many other pages link to it. So linking each page back to some main page can help with both navigation and search engine recognition of the main page.

9. A picture is worth … Along with the title, and meta-tags, a search engine will look at the web page’s content. But what if some of the content is contained in an image? Image tags have an alt attribute to allow for a brief description of the image. Use them. –Use of the alt tag is also relevant to accessibility issues, such as making the page meaningful to readers like JAWS.

10. Keep it simple Using external, linked CSS keeps a page short and simple and easier to search for content. Using basic tags like for headers indicates important content. (You can use CSS to make them look however you want.) Avoiding excessive use of Flash – its content is not searchable

11. Robots If you want your page to be ignored by the search engines, there is the robots meta- tag. There are variations like “nofollow” as well as a robots.txt file one can place in the domain root. "I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference."

12. References http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage. html?page=2167931 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_tag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine _optimization http://www.google.com/support/webmaster s/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&topic=85 22