J-Henderson » search engine http://www.j-henderson.co.uk PHP & HTML Tutorial site Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:03:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Meta tags – Making your webpage search engine friendly http://www.j-henderson.co.uk/2010/01/meta-tags-making-your-webpage-search-engine-friendly/ http://www.j-henderson.co.uk/2010/01/meta-tags-making-your-webpage-search-engine-friendly/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:43:49 +0000 J-Henderson http://www.j-henderson.co.uk/?p=18 By now you should have created your first web page and be ready to post this online, however you may be wondering how to go about making your site search engine friendly? Well your anwser is META tags. Lets take a look at a simple HTML page with some meta tags.

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

    <meta name="description" content="J-Henderson, Tutorials for PHP and HTML" />
    <meta name="keywords" content="J-Henderson, Henderson, Tutorials, PHP, HTML, Blog" />

    <title>My First Page</title>

  <body>
    <h1>My header</h1>
      <p>a paragraph</p>
  </body>
</html>

For the most part these are pretty self explanatory:

meta name=”description”: This is the description for your website, you may not realise that this description is shown to the user whenever they use a search engine, the description is normally shown under the main link to your website, and only contains a few paragraphs detailing your site.

meta name=”keywords”: Keywords are what a search engine uses to index your site, using the keywords in the code above if you were to goto your favourite search engine such as google and type in the keywords above this site would show up pretty near the top of the results.

The less obvious meta tag, <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> tells our browser what character encoding to use, to be able to validate your web code you will need to tell the browser what character encoding to use, ISO-8859-1 is pretty much the standard encoding you want to use.

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