Introduction

This tutorial is about how to use meta tags on your web pages in order to improve the accuracy of the results returned by search engines. The LSE search engine supports meta tags and so the benefits of using meta tags will be seen by any visitor to the School site when searching.

This paper goes into some detail about meta tags but if you want to read how to include them immediately, have a look at How to enter meta tags in FrontPage 2000. FrontPage allows you to add meta tags easily, without bothering with any of the HTML code. Issues to be considered has information on some important issues to consider. The information in the other sections will help you understand how search engines index your pages.

The LSE search engine builds up an index of the entire School site during the weekdays, following all the hyperlinks and building a database of unique words and URLs. Certain distinctions are made between tags - some are given more weight than others. These include:

<title> - the title of the page (what appears along the very top of the browser window, set in FrontPage 2000 via 'Page Properties'). This is given more weight than headings or ordinary text.
<h2>...<h5> - headings (set via the 'Style' drop-down list in FrontPage). These are given less weight than the title but more than ordinary text.
<p> - ordinary text. This is given less weight than either of the above but repetitions of words can add up to give a page a high score even if there aren't any headings.

In other words, the better structured your web page, the greater the weight the search engine will give it in the index database and the higher it will appear in the results returned. This is also true of most of the results that external search engines produce. The LSE search engine also gives more weight to pages that contain more text.

The search engine that the main LSE web server uses has just been upgraded to the version that supports a fourth type of tag - meta tags. A number of external search engines also make use of meta tags in order to return accurate search queries.

Meta tags are given the most weight on the LSE server. The details below are intended to make sure that by using meta tags, your homepage will at least appear on the first screen's worth of results. Often, your homepage may not contain as many occurrences of your department name as on other pages. This is often why search results don't always rank your homepage as the most relevant. Meta tags will help resolve this issue - but only if applied correctly and where appropriate.

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