Effective HTML Code
The <Head> contains
Title
- This is very important. One - it is what you see first when the search results come up. And Two - it is a useful banner add across the top of the page all the time the page is on screen. Three - Search engines can get quite excited when they find key words in it. Try to make it descriptive, but not so long that it won't all fit along the top of the page. Lots of times it will be the main reason viewers choose your page. Incorporate your most significant keywords. SYNTAX=<TITLE>Your Well Thought Out Title</TITLE>Description
(Some older programs name it Subject, but rename it to Description). Write several sentences, (150 characters, incl. spaces is the optimum), using many keywords. Remember, this is what viewers will use to help them to decide if they really want to see your page or the one next to it. Describe the Web Site, not your Company or your Grandfather. Don't get too carried away with keywords though, remember that the other pages all need Meta Tags too, so there are lots more places still to put them. SYNTAX=<META Name="description" Content="150 characters worth of whatever your interesting description is">Keywords
. Separate them with commas and spaces. E.G., Html, tutorial, meta, tag, free, reference, title, description, robot, comment, Opotiki, Rhys, Bartle. The prime factor is the proportion of keywords on the page. I.E., If your page has four words and four keywords, then those Keywords rank at 100% relevance to the searched for terms. And that is another good argument in favour of having only a few words on each page. Try to use your keywords as high up on the page as possible. The earlier they appear, the greater the relevance. SYNTAX=<META Name="keywords" Content="Keyword1, Keyword2, KeyPhrase, etc">Robot
. A Meta Tag that tells the Search Engine 'Crawler' (or Robot) what to do. Like "carry on and follow all the links to index all my pages", or "don't list this page". The following Meta Tag code on your first page would tell the Robot to index the page, remember it all, and to carry on through the links to the following pages. Syntax=<META Name="robots" Content="all,index,follow ">; And putting | noindex,nofollow | instead would have the opposite effect. You wouldn't, for instance, want your email response form page indexed.The <Body>contains
Comment Tag
. Not all engines use the Meta Tags, some just display the first couple of lines of body text, (If any!!). You can work around that by using a Comment Tag in the Body that mirrors your Description Tag. This is useful on a page with little or no text. It is a lot more use than having a Page Description that only displays, for instance, "Click here to go to next Page". SYNTAX =<!--// Comment "Repeat the interesting stuff you put above in your Description"//!-->.Keep it simple
. We live in a world of instant everything, and most people's patience is very slim, so, Keep your page simple. Make it short, with big type that is easy to scan. If you must have pages with lots of info on, then put them in as linked pages, so that only the really interested ones will have to wade through the "heavy stuff". This page, for instance, is only going to be read by serious students of HTML. Short pages with small file sizes load a lot faster. Busy and impatient people will just click off to the next page if yours is slow loading.Text
. Use large text, and have enough words near the top of the page to keep the reader occupied while your graphics are loading. At busy times graphics load at 1kb per second, or less, so that even a smallish photo of 12kb size should have 12 seconds worth (reading time) or more of text above or beside it. I was shown a page recently that had 628kb (628 seconds=10 1/2 minutes! ) of graphics on it - this page just locked up solid at peak time!Tables
. Use tables to position text and graphics. Several short tables for preference, because a table will not begin to load until it has found and read the table end tag. Also be aware that unless you put in pic WIDTH and HEIGHT tags, the table can't load until the pics have loaded, because the browser won't know how much space to leave for them.What, why, who ?
Try and figure out why somebody might be looking at your page. Then you put things on the page that will meet that need. In other words, a customer who is looking for your street address or a contact form to buy some of your product, doesn't need to wade through three paragraphs of company history to get there! (Even if your founder grandfather was the most interesting feller in the whole wide West). If you must put in all that stuff about Grand-dad, put it in as a linked page, and give the viewer the choice of taking the extra time to read it if they want.Remember - If you want to want to understand how somebody did something on a page that you like, just click View/Page Source, (View/Source on I.E.), to see the code they used to get the effect. A good learning tool is to paste bits of code into a blank page and see what happens when you view it. You can copy them straight from your browser by going View/Source, then highlight the bit of code you want, and then use Copy/Paste into your blank page.
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