Kumamoto University:
Comparative Culture

Rick Lavin

Survival English, Part Two

This time, let's think about food: restaurants, fast food, etc.

HTML: Meta tags

Let's take a look at meta tags. The pages most of you are making now are experiments, so these tags are not so important to you. However, if you make pages in the future for commercial reasons, or to publicize your research, you'll want people to look at them. The way to do that is by using meta tags.

Meta tags have no function in a page's layout, and they do not appear to the viewer. But they help search engines to find out what your page is about.

If you often use search engines, you'll probably have been frustrated by the number of results you get. That may be partly because your query was not very good. It's also partly because the authors of the pages didn't include good meta tags.

From the point of view of the author, if you write an important paper on spontaneous magnetostriction, you want everybody interested in this topic to find your page. But you don't want to fool New Age thinkers who want to live more spontaneously into visiting your page.

Without meta tags, many search engines will scan the first few lines of your page and catalog the words they find. So you'll probably disappoint a lot of New Age people. If you make good meta tags, often it will become very clear what your page is about. So you'll appear near the top of the results page for those interested in magnetostriction but be ignored by everybody else.

Example

Look at the HEAD of my KotoWorld homepage. It should become clear how to make meta tags.

< HEAD >
< TITLE > Rick Lavin's KotoWorld Home& lt /TITLE >
< META Name="description"
Content="Koto Home page for KotoWorld, a guide to the koto, the Japanese harp or zither or lute" >
< META Name="keywords" Content="koto, music, Japan, harp, zither, lute, culture, world music" >
< /HEAD >

"TITLE" and "KEYWORDS" are the most important tags. It's probably better to use FEW keywords if possible.