Knights of Columbus: Local Council Template
| A WEB SITE FOR A LOCAL COUNCIL REGISTERING YOUR SITE ON A SEARCH ENGINE This commentary is not meant to be all-inclusive. For further information, please consult a good reference. The question concerning web site listings is an interesting one, and the process can be rather complex. However, it is good to remember that sites such as AltaVista and Webcrawler can take up to four weeks to "spider" your site after you submit the address. A "Spider" is the name for a program that crawls all over your site and reads the text from your home page (and possibly other pages on the site) as well and puts it in a database. The database can then be searched and will return the sites that have the largest number of most accurate matches. An interesting fact: AltaVista's databases are used for the site Looksmart, and the database for Webcrawler is used by Excite! It is not necessary to add superfluous visible text to your home page for a spider to find it. You should keep the visible text to a minimum for aesthetic reasons (there are no technical objections). Instead, add invisible text to the page that is thoroughly descriptive of your site without being repetitive. You do this by using META tags and TITLE commands. On the other hand, some search engines ignore META tags and TITLE commands and instead view the text placed in invisible comments. Here's how you use both META tags and COMMENTS. The code illustrated below should be inserted above the BODY command on pages of HTML script. TITLES You normally have only one title on your page, the one that appears in the blue bar at the top of your web browser's window. The secret is to use a second or even third one. These will not appear at the top of the window but will be read by some spiders. E.g.:
META TAGS These may be included after the "HEAD" command and before the "BODY" command. One type is for a general description of the site and another is for potential key words. Include both! Try not to be too repetitive, however, when making these up. E.g.:
COMMENT TAGS You can also place the same information as in the META tags in a comment tag using the code Insert the same text as is above in the META tags, by putting it between the hyphens in this code. Remember that none of this text will actually appear (be visible) on the page. Using the above methods is practically guaranteed to increase your placement in response listings on the search engines to which you have submitted your site. Make these additions to your code prior to submitting your site for consideration. |