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k-style
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 03:46
ok im a complete noob to this, i just recently designed my site thru bludomains, now is live and running and ive been hearing that although google search engine doesnt see flash based sites, meta tags might help a bit in boosting you up the google search....i dont know if i make sense...but what are meta tags to beging with, where do i put them???...wats TFP?...all these terms are new to me and i have been searching on here and have not been able to find anything...
Jonta
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 14:34
The closest thing I found on Wikipedia for TFP is Time for prints and similar. Where this enters into webdesign is a mystery to me.

Secondly, it is very helpful for us if you looked a bit closer at your spelling. Spellcheckers are available for a variety of browsers.

Read this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization).
tracknut
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 15:12
There are a whole bucket-load of meta tags, all of which go inside the <head> ..... </head> section of your web page. They are used for a wide variety of purposes, essentially supplying "meta" information about your page.

The only one I'm aware of that's relevant to SEO on Google is the description tag, which looks like:
<meta name="description" content="Elkin Cardona, photographer in anytown usa specializing in portraits and seniors">
Your site has the description tag and title tag placeholders already, you need to fill them in.

Dave
Hikin Mike
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 16:23
I'm going to disagree Dave. ;)

I think the most important "tag" is the title element. An example for a title element <title>YourTown, YourState - Some Specialties Phography</title>. Try to limit it to about 70 characters or less. :D
tracknut
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 16:32
I'm going to disagree Dave. ;)

No disagreement, Mike. She asked specifically what "meta" tags were, so that's why my response was focused on them. Certainly the "title" tag is critical, and we haven't even touched on actual text content on the page... ;)

Dave
joedlh
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 16:45
Your flash content is contained within an html file. The home page or default page is usually called index.htm or default.htm. It might have a different extension if it has server side script content, such as index.php or index.asp. If you open this page in an editor, near the top will be a <head> tag with text in between. It will be ended with this tag: </html>

The meta tags are placed between the <head>...</head> tags. The proper syntax for a meta tag for keyword content that will be picked up by search engines is something like:

<meta name="keywords" content="Internet Publishing, Self Publishing, Vanity Press, Books, Authors, E-publishing, Web Publishing, alternative publishing">

Your keywords will be different, of course. Make sure your quotation marks are all in the correct place.

Once you add your metatags, you must upload the file to your site.
tracknut
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 16:52
Most popular search engines, including Google, do not use the "keywords" meta tag. It doesn't hurt to have it for some of the more esoteric search engines that do use it, but these days it's getting pretty useless to use that for your keywords. Keywords should be in the actual body content of the web site.

Dave
Hikin Mike
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 17:15
No disagreement, Mike. She asked specifically what "meta" tags were, so that's why my response was focused on them. Certainly the "title" tag is critical, and we haven't even touched on actual text content on the page... ;)

Dave

I guess I just missed that part. :oops:
joedlh
17th of September 2009 (Thu), 17:25
One other strategy that became obvious to me some time ago: have the subject of your jpeg files somewhere in the file name. Image-searching engines will often key off the name. They cannot identify the content. If you keep the camera designation, it will take longer for you images to show up in an image search, if ever. I can't say if the search engines actually open the files to look at the metadata, but you can put keywords in there too, as well as the subject.
k-style
21st of September 2009 (Mon), 15:55
Most popular search engines, including Google, do not use the "keywords" meta tag. It doesn't hurt to have it for some of the more esoteric search engines that do use it, but these days it's getting pretty useless to use that for your keywords. Keywords should be in the actual body content of the web site.

Dave


could you be kind enough to explain this a little better for me?

i placed the tags in the "title" "description" and "keywords"

still when i google my page doesnt show...:(
Hikin Mike
21st of September 2009 (Mon), 16:09
could you be kind enough to explain this a little better for me?

i placed the tags in the "title" "description" and "keywords"

still when i google my page doesnt show...:(

I'm not Dave, but I'll try.

What words are you typing to find you? Also, it does take a few weeks until Google indexes any new content. :D
tracknut
21st of September 2009 (Mon), 17:42
could you be kind enough to explain this a little better for me?

i placed the tags in the "title" "description" and "keywords"


I'll try :)

Search engines (Google, Bing, etc) rummage around the internet and collect information about sites like yours. They "index" this information in a database, based on keywords that appear in the site. This is so that when someone goes to Google and types "spaghetti" it can (without going and looking around the internet) refer to it's database, find all sites that contain the word "spaghetti" and show you the urls. There's more, but I'm trying to simplify.

So, how do the search engines do this indexing business? They read your site periodically for starters. But all search engines are are not all the same, and they all have slightly different mechanisms for doing that indexing. In the case of Google, the "meta keywords" line that you filled out on your site is not used. In fact most search engines do not use that field because it has become a place where folks would just put a huge batch of keywords, in the hopes of convincing the search engines that their site was more important than any other site. Instead, most search engines are requiring the actual *content* of your site to contain relevant text and keywords, and they index off that content.

So, what I meant was that while you may get some value out of filling out that meta keywords line on your web site, it does no good as far as Google is concerned, which was the search engine you mentioned in your original post.

I hope that helps.

Dave