GED 579

GED/GSA 579

Promoting Your Web Site
Meta - Tags, information from Brian MacDonald, SMC Web Developer

One way to increase your chances of being correctly and more prominently listed in a search engine is by having proper tags in the HTML code of your web page that identify:
"keywords" - the words or phrases that people might type in to locate content such as yours
FOR EXAMPLE Saint Michael's Keywords: Saint Michael's, vermont, Burlington, Catholic, college, university, international, Saint Michael's, Prevel, Catholic college, edmundite, higher education, undergraduate, graduate, humanities, mathematics, natural sciences, liberal arts, sciences, residential, four year, SMC, St. Mike's, saint mike's, edmundite, society of st. edmund, new england, volunteerism, service, entrepreneur, spirit
"description" - a phrase that may show up as the descriptive sentence accompanying your search engine placement - this depends upon the search engine though
Saint Michael's description: Saint Michael's College is a vibrant Catholic liberal arts college, located on a beautiful 400 acre campus in the Burlington area of Vermont -- international since 1904.

You can then go to the Meta Tag Generator web site and do "Title", "Description", and "Keywords". You can then paste these directly into the header portion of your HTML page.
Yes, you'll have to look at the code, but it won't be that bad. The web site creates a new "Head" section. Just open up your page and replace the existing head section with the new one. It's quite easy to see the HTML code in FrontPage by clicking on the HTML tab at the lower-left corner of the editing screen.