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Meta data and optimization
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Meta data usageMeta data schemes for a Web page aims at giving information on the content of that page in a synthetic and conventional way, about its author, owner, the public targeted, dates in relation with the page and about the desired robots behaviour. Meta tags and search enginesGiving information to whom? To robots, including internal ones, and mainly to Internet search engines. Some search engines use two specific meta tags: DESCRIPTION for the presentation of the page and KEYWORDS for the keywords and expressions. All use the TITLE tag. Many search engines use the words of the page, alone or combined with the description et keywords tags. All search bots may use the instructions given through the ROBOTS tag and via the robots.txt file. Meta tags and page contentAbuses and misuse of meta tags and of the words of the page are unfortunately very common: meta tags say one thing, the page says something else; or the page say something that does not correspond with the real website content, etc. Anyway, such abuses may only bring a temporary benefit: be temporarily on top of a search engine. If an organization get a good placement pretending to sell computers, as they sells training or software, abused visitors will immediately get out as the Website displays in their browser. This is not the good way. it is really important that the meta tags, as well as the page content and images form a coherent whole. Misconsidering this rule will bring negative results for the optimization of the page. It is hard to reach the page optimization level and this is probably the cause of many abuses. Which elements to optimize?When optimizing from the angle of search engines ranking, the meta tags, as well as the words of the page, as well as ALT attributes of images, page names and directory names must be taken into account. But the page optimization targets in first the visitor, who must get the meaning. A Web page is has its own semantic, made from words and images, real images or perceived images. For the visitor, the words, their repetition, the page and directory names, the ALT and TITLE attributes of images, the images have their importance; as well as the relationship between words and images. | Using i-Meta Manageri-Meta Manager is one of the tools that we have developed for the optimization of the web sites that we provide to our clients. The free version of i-Meta Manager makes it possible to see and work simultaneously with the TITLE tag, the DESCRIPTION et KEYWORDS meta tags, the words of the page, the word repetitions and the ALT attributes. i-Meta Manager has built in counters, that indicate the number of characters, words, expressions, word repetitions for the tags and for the page. Using i-Meta manager is quite simple: you set the url of the page that you want to work with and you click on "Check URL". i-Meta Manager will bring back the TITLE, the DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS meta tags, with the number of characters, words and expressions used and an analysis of the words and word repetitions in the page, as well as the ALT attributes for the IMG tags. You may then optimize these data, use the Count function to control the results of your efforts on the meta data and export your work in a text file. If you want to modify your page at this stage, you will need to upoad it after modification if you want to check the full result with i-Meta Manager. It is possible to modify the stopwords list, for instance to adapt it to another language than English and French. You may also install an i-Meta Manager box on your website. We also offer a hosted Pro version. With the hosted version, it is possible to work on a full web site, save the work and get it back at any time, get a fully modified page ready to upload, filter the pages or use wizards for a promotion job. We will launch a packaged solution to install locally on the developer machine. The packaged version of i-Meta Manager will require to have Miva Mia or Miva empresa installed on the local machine. This is a cosy version, especially for dynamic Web sites, as it enablee real time optimization, modification and upload. Complementary sources
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Minimal structure of an HTML pageOur exemple targets: a DOCTYPE corresponding to the HTML 4.01 Transitional specification; a LINK tag for an external stylesheete; an external Javascript source. To learn more about the DOCTYPE
Meta tags syntaxThe example below includes common meta data for a web page encoded iso-8859-1. To learn more, you can see the specialized sources that we give in the "Complementary sources" section.
[1] If you use accentuated characters and set your character set at utf-8, you must encode every single accentuated character, including forms, buttons or ALT attributes. |
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