Learning Report 2

Description and Keyword Meta Tags

Resource: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_meta.asp

What did I learn?

This week I looked at some tutorials about using the meta tags. Meta tags have lots of different possible functions, but are in general are used to provide information about your webpage to the browser or search engines. The meta tags I would like to focus on are the description and keyword tags.

The description and keyword tags are useful when optimizing your page for search engines. In the description tag you include a brief summary of what your page is about, and this would be used as the description that is seen under your websites name in the search engine. In the keyword tag you enter several words which when entered by someone into a search engine should flag your webpage as a relevant page. I was dissapointed to find that fewer search engines are now using these tags as part of their indexing process, there are still some that do, so it is useful to still include them.

How did I implement it?

The first step in implementing these meta tags is to develop a brief and concise description of the content and purpose of my webpage, and also to create a list of keywords which a person might use if they were looking for a webpage such as mine. For my page specifically, I don't that it would be extremely common for someone lloking for a resume to use a a search engine to find it, they would either already know of me andknow the web address, or would use a site like monster.com, but someone looking for a web designer would likely do that, so that is what I focused on when creating my keywords.

After creating the list and description, these tags are simply placed in the head section of your code:

< meta name="description" content="Insert you webpage Description here!" />

You can go to my home page and view the source code to see the description and keywords that I used for my webpage.

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