Using keywords and tags
in your website design is part of the process called Search Engine Optimization
(SEO). To understand how best to develop your site it can be helpful to first
understand how search engines work.
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo use a process known
as "crawling". This basically means that they have programs that scour through
the internet, or crawl, to find new and updated web pages. Their programs decide
which pages to crawl, how often and how many pages to retrieve. while crawling
through the page the program will create an index of all the words used in the
site. They also pick up the words used in the keywords and tags sections of each
web page. in addition to crawling, Google uses a system called "page ranking".
The rank, or score, given to a website is determined by the number of pages
linking to that site, and the number of links away from that site to other
sites.
When a person goes to the search engine
(e.g. Google or Yahoo) they enter the words they are looking for such as DOULA
TRAINING. The search engine will look through their index of sites and find the
web pages that most closely match the words (or keywords) entered. The ideal is
to have your site come up on the first page of search results when people enter
search words that are relevant for your business.
A web page is written in a particular
language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). You may be familiar with this
already if you have been responsible for developing your website. HTML is laid
out in a very specific way. Each section of the web page consists of tags. There
is an opening and a closing tag for each section. For example:
<html>
<head>
Heading text
</head>
<body>
This is where the body of your web
page would go
</body>
</html>
In the header section you can
add metatags and keywords to tell search engines
what your site is about. To create metatags and
keywords you simply enclose them between an
opening and closing tag as below. The
description metatag contains a sentence or two
about your site. The keywords metatag contains
the words that people might enter to find your
services or products. Theya re all separated by
a comma. Let's look at the Childbirth
International site as an example:
<head>
<title>Childbirth International</title>
<meta name="description" content="Training for
Doulas, Childbirth Educators and breastfeeding
Counselors everywhere">
<meta name="keywords" content="doula, training,
childbirth educator">
</head>
If you find your website is not
appearing high up on the search engines, Google
has some excellent pages that help you to
analyze and improve your site:
Google information on improving your site
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