The mighty <meta>

1

Question:

how does one go about coding their html to be regognized by various search engines? This is what I’ve used for meta tags:

meta NAME=“keywords” CONTENT=“sean macintosh, sean, macintosh, graphic design, graphic, design, poetry, web design, brochure, poster, package, packaging, chap book, self promotion, wounded, sunset, marketing, branding, logo”

What gives? Any help is greatly appreciated.:block::love:

thanks,
/sm

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view source on Kirupa

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an interesting thing I learned today at work… don’t even bother with the “keywords” meta. There’s only 1 search engine that looks for that nowadays… plus, all the other metatags… description, etc… they’re being used less and less. Why? search engines ran into these problems:

  1. People would add “sex, britney naked, etc”… to the metatags to increase their search results… this made a searches less relevant.
  2. Companies would use metatags as dirty tactics against their competitors… for example… a company could have the competing company’s name, products, etc on the metatags of their page, so that their page would show up instead of the competitors…

With processor speeds up the way they are, search engines can run spiders that can actually parse through the whole content of the site. So the relevancy of a page when searched is based on the content, not just the metatags. If my memory serves me right, that’s why engines like webcrawler, hotbot, and altavista started sucking. Today’s search engines are a lot better - Google has their famous algorithm which determines relevancy by tracking links to a page… it also tracks links OUT of the page…

We had a talk about that today at work… and this whole time I’ve been working on my metatags just to find out that they’re becoming irrelevant. The best thing you can do to increase traffic to your site is to register the site in search engines, have lots of content, have lots of links, and make sure other people link to you.

4

can the read content from Flash?

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well… I know that you can get info from elements inside a swf. I’ve been working with 508 compliance (accessiblity for blind people) and I know that screen readers like JAWS say things like “button… button…” etc. So I wouldn’t be surprised if some spiders can get the content from flash movies. But I know for a fact that most don’t. That’s why having a flash button for a link is bad… you should have a text link.
Of course, that’s changing… and things might be completely different a year from now.

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You know when you publish a file from flash?

Well you know how before the embed code they have the comment tags that say what text is used withing your file and such?

That is for search engines.

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No, it doesnt read Flash text. To be index by google for example, you need to have text on your web page. A querry for “morsedesigns” on google and you find my page, but the only way google found it was by the copyright information at the bottom.

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i can’t find my page on search engines. Maybe it is because of the dumb free domain ;p
.de and .com domains can be found very easy and they really search for metatags…