[sarettah]

Let's talk about html a little bit.

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language

WW3 Consortium ) - controls HTML standards
Breakdown of the various html statements and parts
Beginners guide to HTML

HTML is a document language, not a programming language. It exists to provide a standard for presentation of documents.

An HTML document consists of 3 main parts:

1. The document itself (begins with ends with )
2. The head of the document (begins with ends with )
3. The body of the document (begins with ends with )

So, whenever we are writing html we start at the top of a text document with a tag.

The head section describes the document. Within the head section are various directives that you can pass to a browser to tell it what the document is.

The first tag I usually use in the head section is the title tag:



Most browsers pick up the title tag and display it at the top of the browser window.

Most of your other tags in the head section are META tags. META tags are not displayed by the browser, they pass information to "non humans" ie; browsers, search engines, the like.

The two META tags I always use are the description tag and the keywords tag.




The body of the document is the part that is displayed in the browser. This is where all the cool stuff happens


So, our nest step is to "tag up" some of the code we created earlier.

Let's use the ssi_include file we created earlier as our working file.

In your editor open up the ssi_include.shtml file.

In between the open and close head tags





Now, a general rule I follow is to make sure that my title, description or keywords do not go beyond 254 characters in length. I don't know if this is a diehard rule or not, but it has always worked for me.

Another general rule I follow is to make sure that whatever keywords I feature in the keywords meta tag also appear somewhere in the body of my text and that I don't repeat keywords anywhere in the keywords tag more than 3 times to avoid looking too spammy to a spider. (SEO guys will know these rules a whole lot better than me)

I also make sure to get my most important keywords up into my description.

ie:









There are many other meta tags that can and should be used in a document. I would consider these to be the minimum for anything you want a spider to search.

a nice little meta tag introduction is at http://searchenginewatch.com/webmast...le.php/2167931