Robots and Spiders and Metatags, Oh My!
January 26, 2008
These are just a few of the creepy crawlies you actually want hiding and sneaking around in your website. I have been running into the terms “robot,” “spider,” “metatag” and “crawl” for a few days now as I travel down the path to web designing enlightenment; and these words only just now begin to make a tiny bit of sense to me. From what I gather, robots and spiders are programs that interface(crawl) with a website and find the pieces of information(metatags) that are useful to search engines in deciding if and how to index (list) a website. Metatags are items of code (html) that are placed in the index file of your website (you use the text editor to do this). Think of metatags as food for the robots and spiders. If they find good metatags they'll send their buddies along for a taste too. This is what you want.
Today, through happenstance I found a website to analyze the metatags on my site (see http://www.scrubtheweb.com ) I give this site a thumbs up for providing me additional clues as to the nature of spiders and robots; thumbs up for manually submitting my URL to ten search engines; and a thumbs sideways for telling that I have a problem with two many title tags on my site header. (It says I have four where I should have only two. I went to the text editor for my site and looked at the html code; I see only two title tags, but what do I know. ScrubtheWeb is probably right. I'll figure it out later.) I give them a thumbs up for doing all this for free! They also offer a paid subscription service to further optimize search engine visibility. It may or may not be good, but I have no money for a paid subscription anyway, so I'll ponder that at a later date too. You can use your favorite search page to look for a meta tag analyzer. Some provide some level of free service and some are paid service only.
Next, Google Webmaster Tools is an excellent resource. I ran my URL through their diagnostic process. They instructed me in adding a metatag to my website. It was easy. They also recommend I submit a site map. This I put on my to do list. As usual, I don't fully understand how to go about it. We'll come back to that later.
About adding metatags and other items directly to your website's index file, I recommend that anyone who has been building a website using only your web host's wizards or other help features, take a look at your actual html code via your text editor. Don't do anything to it! Just look; sit with it for a while; and do this every now and then to lessen your anxiety about looking at the guts of your website. Try to identify the Head (look for <Head>. Scroll down and look at the Body (look for <Body>). Notice where your text appears. Note the code that surrounds any images you might have put on your site. It's not so scary. You can make changes right there if you want to.
As with a spoken language, you can become fairly proficient in HTML through immersion. For instance, simply be being exposed, I've learned so far that <P> separates paragraphs. And <BR> inserts a line break without paragraph spacing. Color and font codes easy to identify and change. Most web hosts provide an HTML guide of some sort, but in order for it to begin to make sense, you have to spend some time looking at your code.
Next, I am planning
to put my original site back together and soon, maybe tomorrow or the next day, you'll be able to see it at http://www.MyScienceWebsite.com. Until I do that though .com will redirect you back here to .net.Next time, I'll talk more about getting on the Google index, Yahoo index, etc, and about getting some traffic to my site. After that I'll dive into developing MyScienceWebsite.com for students, parents and teachers. And, you will soon see that I'll be including a lot of links in my blog entries. I have recently become informed that blogs are supposed to contain many links. For the uninitiated blog reader, the differently colored words you see in the text here are items you can click to see more information on the topic of discussion. This is supposed to be fun for you, the reader. So enjoy the soon to be featured links!
Finally, before I leave you, to the skeptics who may suspect that I pretend to the throne of the Web-Imbecile kingdom, you begin to see I truly am born to it. I am quite certain that I misunderstand and misstate a few absolutely vital bits of “information”, but, well, so what. I AM queen of my domain name and I say these things shall all resolve eventually... or will they? Stay tuned.
I conclude todays entry as your very inexpert web developer,
Margaret Doran
bravenet.com