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Judge: web sites for health
 
3.0 How to market:
 
   

3.2 Keywords

To improve the chances of a search engine finding your site in response to a person's search, you need to include appropriate keywords.

Place important keywords in the text at the top of your pages. When writing your content always bear in mind the need for these keywords.

Include keywords and other descriptive information in the beginning section of your html code. This type of information is called meta data.

  • Meta data is information that defines and describes data.

  • It appears at the beginning of the html code in the 'Head' section and is invisible to the user.

  • To see the meta data used by a site, click on 'view' and 'source' in the browser menu.

You should include this minimal amount of meta data for your site. Meta data should be used for every page:

Title of the Web page

This appears in the title bar of the browser, the search engine listing, and the description when someone bookmarks the site. The keywords it contains are used by the search engine to find the site.

  • <TITLE> xxx < /TITLE>.

  • About 15-20 words.

  • Use the main keywords that describe your site, for example "Judge: web sites for health - support group guidelines - how to market".

Description of the site or page

This will be used by some search engines as the summary in search results.

  • <META NAME="description" CONTENT="xxx">.

  • 200-250 characters.

  • Make it readable and informative.

Keywords

Some search engines use these to find the site.

  • <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="xxx">.

  • Up to 1,000 characters.

  • Include common spelling errors and different versions of words.

For further information see Sullivan Danny, How To Use HTML Meta Tags, Search Engine Watch, 14 Oct 2002, (http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167931) [Opens in new browser window].

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© Copyright for this site is held by Contact a Family and the Information Society Research and Consultancy Group, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University. Site published February 2003. Last updated October 2006. Review date October 2007.