Why care about meta?

Because it's how people find your website and because the wrong ones could cost you traffic and money. Before detailing the meta tags that can improve the search process, it is helpful to understand a little more about how searches on the web work. There are five components that you're dealing with when you are thinking about making your site "findable" and search engine friendly.

First, is the search spiders.

Some of the search/directory services employ spiders; others don't. The spider is an automatic agent that goes out and searches the web for anything new. It turns its results into an index.  This index becomes the foundation of the search returns.

The index is a listing of all the content the search service knows about. Some services, like Alta Vista and Web Crawler, use primarily spider-generated indexes. Others, like Yahoo, are primarily directories and the index is based upon a human-selected set of data.

Directories are compiled, organized sets of sites. There is typically some human intervention which says "swamp-lands real estate is a type of business that belongs in the regional/business category." Directories don't include every single page on the web but, by limiting themselves, they can often be more useful, if less comprehensive. Directories too, generate indexes but these indexes are guides to the contents of the directories rather than maps of the entire web.

A search engine is the tool that translates a reader's search request into a query that searches through the indexes and returns a search response. Search engines use all sorts of technologies including items like keywords, weighting, proximity, and full text search. Don't drive yourself crazy trying to understand how each works;just know that none work exactly the same and there is no silver bullet for making your site hop to the top of every list.  No matter who tells you they can "break the code" and get you #1 results.

Finally, the search interface is the layout and tools through which a reader enters his or her question. Don't underestimate the human factor in searches; if you know people refer to your content area by a particular name or description, use that in a meta tag and in the description of any directory submissions you make for your site. The more you think like your readers, the more likely potential readers are to find you.

Search Sites

There are seven major search services; this alphabetical list is subject to change at any time, but at the moment they are:
•    Alta Vista
•    Excite
•    Hot Bot
•    InfoSeek
•    Lycos
•    Open Text
•    WebCrawler
•    Yahoo
And, naturally, none of them index pages or use meta tags in precisely the same way.  So, make sure to read and do what each prefers.

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