Area 10 [archive] - BUILD YOUR OWN WEBSITE PART SEVEN

This page is to introduce you briefly to meta-tags, just to include some basic information I've gained along the way. I can't vouch for its accuracy [there's a great deal of conflicting information about meta-tags circulating around the Internet] but I know from a couple of free assessments which were done on our pages, that our meta-tags are passable if not brilliant. If you want detailed information do a search on one of the major search engines - you'll encounter endless information.

To insert basic meta-tags on your pages, select "Change Background" on your left-hand-bar, then down-arrow, Custom (question mark) which will take you to the text/background colors page we've met previously.

At the top of this screen you'll find five options. The first of these is "Title". There are two options here - make sure Custom Title has the little dot-in-the-circle (if not, click in the circle to select this).

In the long white box, type the chosen title for your page. This needs ideally to be something which mentions the name of your website as well as something specific about your page. You'll see (if you look at the bar at the top of your screen) that I didn't include Project HappyChild in this one - because my view was that identifying the content of this page accurately was more important. Whatever you type here needs to fit across the top of an A4 sheet when printed (leaving space for "page 1 of 4" or whatever, on the right, which prints automatically).

If you click next on summary, you should see that the "creation date" (whatever date you're making the page) and author's name (yours?) should have gone in automatically. I don't know where this orginates from but it always appears on our file pages. The other two items - keywords and abstract - will get filled in later (automatically) from what you're about to input in the advanced screen (on the right of the available options). It doesn't appear there until after you've saved the advanced input, I don't believe. You can - actually - input your keywords on the Summary screen (but you get much less text space here; the computer will beep to say the section's full, well before it would do if you input the keywords to the advanced section). As mentioned it will transfer the keywords (significantly more possible quantity) into the Summary keywords section, at some stage - but if you wish to make major modifications later it will require lots of content to be deleted before it will allow you to input anything, and you're better off deleting all the keywords in Summary and starting again in Advanced, re-inputting the keyword tag.

For now, ignore Summary and go to Advanced. The long white box at the top is for your "base URL" - in here, type in the full page address of the page you're working on (e.g. our welcome page would be http://www.happychild.org.uk/index.htm ). No space after the URL, and no underline - this has only occurred because, as previously, it's standard formatting in page-building that whatever URLs I type in the text will automatically hyperlink as soon as I type the space after the last letter.

Now you have to fill in the big box with some proper meta-tags (WordPerfect Suite 8 does most of the html setting work for you, with the other meta-tag options).

Type as follows (match characters and spaces exactly, except [obviously!] where you need to input your own text):

<meta name="description" content="up to 25 words describing your page and your site"><meta name="distribution" content="global"><meta name="keywords" content="up to 1000 characters of keywords, being word comma space word comma space eg. build, your, own, web, page, webpage, webpages, pages, etc. - being that the average word is five characters and the comma and space take up two, this will allow about 140 keywords maximum in total, word comma space word">

And that's all there is to it. I'm told it's important to have your page title (the one that prints from your file) very similar to your "description" [which is what people see when they locate your page on the search engines] and that the first few keywords in your meta-tag should be approximately the same, also that the first few words of text on your actual page should again be the same.

I have to admit I don't consciously do any of that - but I do attempt to remember to put in the meta-tags for each page, particularly the title (so it's correct when people print the page/s) and the URL (because this too gets listed on the search engines). The keywords I probably confine to about 50, most of the time, if that. Not all search engines look at your keywords, apparently - some of them just assess the text on your page (and we're talking robots here, in the main): our keywords are enough to bring us up (apparently) on quite a few search engines in one mode or another. Only two of our pages have so far been properly "registered" with the search engines (one was done through Submission Wizard, which apparently is available cheaply for up to three months at a time on www.tucows.com , and one through Martin Lockey's spidering program) - but this has been enough to allow true robots like the Alta Vista search engine to visit progressively greater areas of our site, with the result that "happychild" brings up about 140 of our pages.

Realistically you will need to "spider" at least one of your pages, or ask someone to do this for you. Apparently the greatest percentage of general site traffic comes via search engines, although only fractionally below that is traffic generated by links to your site from other people's websites, so link-building is important.

One of the shortcuts I use when multiple page-building for a new area, is to use page templates. When I have created a page (like this one) which is going to be set out in approximately the same way as the one which follows it, I will save [Finish - Publish] the page, then re-save [Finish - Publish] it, amending the file name (eg to the next page in the Series, in this case Page 0008). I then exit the file (to avoid spoiling Page 0007 by accident) and re-open Page 0008. The graphics etc. are constant between pages (as are the tables, hyperlinks etc.) so this saves considerably on the time factor.

If you do this, it is very important, as soon as you go into the "new copy of the page" [and after you've deactivated the hyperlinks!] to go straight to the meta-tags and amend them (especially the title bar, description and base URL). If you forget to do this you may upload your page with the wrong meta-tags on it [and that's probably infinitely worse than no meta-tags at all]. I must admit to attempting to identify keywords which will suit all the pages in a specific area, to avoid having to re-input a separate set of keywords for every page.

Well - you've got the meta-tag information now, so your course on pagebuilding is just about complete! Obviously it's an - exceedingly - simplistic course and wasn't intended for anyone who already knew how to build pages. I hope it will have filled in some of the "gaps" for anyone who was unfamiliar with WordPerfect Suite 8.

I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has found these notes useful (let me know your site address so I can have a look at how you've used them!)

Best wishes, Penny

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