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METADATA AND SEARCH ENGINE TIPS

Simply creating Web pages and posting them on a Georgetown Web server does not ensure that your pages will be properly indexed by our search engine. You must take active steps to make certain when a visitor uses the search engine, your site is displayed when appropriate. The key to achieving this is adding metatags to your pages. This document reviews several of the most frequently used metatags. For more information about metatags, see the Web Developer's Virtual Library and the Dictionary of HTML META Tags.

Metatags

Metatags are optional HTML tags that are included between the <HEAD> tags of your page. Metatags are a mechanism by which you can provide supplemental information about a Web page in a standardized form that search engines can use.

<HEAD>
<TITLE>A Concise Document Title</TITLE>
<META name="author" content="the author's name ">
<META name="description" content="a brief description of the Web file">
<META name="keywords" content=" keywords relevant to the document">
<META name="date" content="month day, year">
<META name="revised" content=" month day, year ">
<META name="link type" HREF="URL" type=type of document">
</HEAD>

The title tag provides bibliographical information about the document and is also used to index your page based on the keywords in the title. The author tag also provides a bibliographic record of the HTML file. Note that if the person who created the content of the file is not the same person who did the HTML markup for the file, both the author and the creator can be listed in separate tags. The description tag is the short summary of your page that the search engine will display in search results. It should enable the person looking at it to easily determine the content of the page. The keywords tag lets you explicitly list the keywords you want associated with your page which is used by many search engines to index your HTML files. The date tag is used to indicate the date on which the document was created, and the revised tag indicates the most recent revision date. Finally, the link tag gives developers a way to define relationships with other documents. Although the link tag has been part of HTML for many versions, few browsers take advantage of it. For more information see http://www.wdvl.com/Authoring/HTML/Head/link.html
Here is an example:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Georgetown University Home Page</TITLE>
<META name="author" content="Jane Doe">
<META name="description" content="The home page of Georgetown University">
<META name="keywords" content="Georgetown, university, home, undergraduate, graduate, alumni">
<META name="date" content="December 15, 1996 ">
<META name="revised" content="January 10, 2001 ">
<META name="link type" HREF="my.css" type="text/css">
</HEAD>

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="n" URL="http://some.web.site">

The above tag is useful for redirecting users from an HTML file that has moved recently to its new location. If someone loads a file that contains this tag, he or she will be automatically connected to the address indicated for the URL after n seconds.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" content="Tue, 30 Aug 1996 13:24:30 GMT">

This tag indicates that the document expires on the indicated date. This is useful for HTML files that frequently change, as this tag instructs the Web browser to load a new copy of the file from the server, instead of using the copy in the browser's cache. Note that you must indicate the date in the above format for this tag to function properly.

See the Dublin Core Metadata page for detailed information on the international standards for providing bibliographic records in Web documents.

Metatags and Search Engines

The GU search engine ranks those pages with appropriate metadata very high. There are many different metatags, but the most important in search engine rankings are Keywords, Description and Title. The Title and Description are displayed in search results.

The GU search engine functions as a spider which means starting at the GU home page (http://www.georgetown.edu) it works its way through the site based on the links on the pages. If your site is not linked from anywhere on the GU site, your site will not be indexed.

You may have Web pages in your site you do not want indexed by a search engine. One way to prevent robot "spiders" from following all the links on your page is to use the following tag:

<META name="robots" content="no index, no follow">

This tells the spider not to index this page and not to follow any links from this page. Unfortunately, not all spiders are polite and do not necessarily adhere to the instructions in this metatag. For more information in the robots metatag, see http://WDVL.com/Location/Search/Robots.html.

Remember that these tips are specific to the GU search engine. However, many search engines use similar algorithms to index Web pages. For more information about how other search engine may index your site see http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167891.
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