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Making your webpages easy to find

When pages are unable to be found by a search engine, it doesn't automatically mean that the search engine is broken or outdated. It could be that your page needs some finetuning so that it maximises its 'searchability'.

How search engines work

To help people find your web site, a search engine interprets what your site is about. A search engine may collect information two ways.

A search engine may look at the text on your page, called the body text. It scans your page and identifies important words (called keywords), from which it determines the subject of your page. Therefore on your main page, it pays to be very clear about what you're saying and it is helpful to always have at least 50 keywords on the page.

Secondly, a search engine may look at the text code behind your page - the page source code. The most important things in the page source are the meta tags and title tag. Meta tags are HEAD elements that record information about the current page. You type in this information as meta data, which includes page title, keywords, two-sentence description and author (or creator). Meta tags can also be used to give information to the server.

You can have a look at the page source code of any webpage in the following way. If you're using either Netscape or Internet Explorer, right click your mouse anywhere on the page and select View Source from the pop-up menu. This will bring up a new window showing the page source code.

The industry standards for meta data are the Education Network Australia <EDNA> and Dublin Core ("DC.").

Your <TITLE> tag and "DC.TITLE" meta attribute should contain the same text for the page title. The page title is in the top left corner of the browser and is not the heading in the body text. For your page title, type the name of the previous link to your page. It should be no more than three words. Type the ampersand '&' instead of the term 'and'.

The recommended metadata for a school home page with the page title <title>School of ...</title> is as follows:

A search engine may compare your meta data to your body text to determine the subject of your site. You should use keywords in your links, page title and two-sentence description of your site.

How to optimise your pages for search engines

Meta data is the page source data that gets you more visits to your site. Meta data is contained in the meta tags that are labelled <META name= >.

The templates already have meta tags inserted, along with instructions on what you need to include in each tag. Simply insert your webpage information (meta data) inside the quotation marks where indicated. Other tags have been set to international standards and do not need to be altered.