Stumped! On Meta Tags!

Elekate

Member
Hey Guys!

As some of you know I have gone back to edit my client's website:

Riteway Driving School

And I wondered if any of you knew about what code you would use to make meta tags in a text file and put it into the site? :confused:

Thanks,
Kate
 
As far as I'm aware meta tags aren't used by google anymore... possibly other search engines too, intstead they just use the sites content (I think) at least I've never used meta tags and sites Ive built generally do well...

The main thing is making sure you have your heading tags h1 h2 h3 etc around the right content. key words of a page can be repeated to make up 6-8% of the content and stay safe without being penalised. so If you have a 100 words you could safely use "driving school" around 6 times on a page.

I think that's pretty accurate info but please anyone feel free to correct me.

The things search engines will look at are basically content (and its relevance - a relevant domain name will always help) , the number of incoming links you have (links from other sites - genuine and respectable sites, links on the same server are not much good) and the amount of traffic you get (obvo going back to relevance if your busy you'll been seen as more than likely being genuine.
 
I don't know cuz looked at the source code for peoples sites and they all seem to have meta tas, just most of them hide them or something and not sure how you do that
 
Ok this isn't the first time I've seen h1, h2 etc mentioned and no ones really explained its use (and its new to me too :)) so any chance we can have a little bit more info on the topic.

If I use my site and Elekates site as reference this is how I understand h1 etc from reading up so if you can say how far out I am that would be good :)

My site uses images for the headers so from my understanding the h1 tag wouldn't really be able to be used anyways.
Looking at Elekate's site my understanding says that tags could be used on the sub headings on the 'lessons' page to help with page order on google searches.

As to meta tags etc -

I'm in the process of redoing my site and I was intending to use the
Code:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">
and
Code:
<meta name="keywords" content="text here"/>
I also intend to make sure the title is descriptive as possible (without being stupid) as this seems to be taken into account by google and the likes now.

I may add extra things as I read more into seo but its such a specialist thing these days that we could spend all year just optimising our sites to get higher up google, especially considering there are specialist companies that do this all day long :s
 
h1 h2 etc are heading tags in html and are used to determine the most important content.

Default css in browsers will make them appear larger than other type because generally you would want them to be but you can style them however you want.

On your site Levi, I wouldn't have your logo make it a real image on the page. You should then use the alt tag to describe.

Every image should have an alt tag this is used by screen readers for the visually impaired and as replacement text if someone has images disabled and obviously that makes this text also readable by google.

Basically if its an image containing text your alt tag should say exactly that text, if its an image you can describe it alt="picture of a house"

so in your case you could have <img src="images/logo.png" alt="Image Resolutions" />

Then if you wanted to put a h1 tag around it to say this is the most important content <h1><img src="images/logo.png" alt="Image Resolutions" /></h1>

your next line might be the next most important

<h2>Image Resolutions has been providing a multi disciplined design service since 2005.</h2>

using h1 tags will put margin onto your images so you might want to remove that with css

h1 img, h2 img, h3 img {margin:0; padding:0;}

hope that helps
 
ah I think I get it a bit more now, h1 etc just helps give order to google keyword preferences which should help the search rankings.

And I was using the alt text anyways because of the remote possibility of a screen reader :)

I will play with it later :)
 
I don't think you should put <h1></h1> tags around images. That's not what they are for.

You use heading tags for headings. So you should only use <h1></h1> once on each page and that would be for the title or the main heading. Not for wrapping around your logo. Your logo is not the most important content anyway. Google can't read images like they can read text so your heading tags should be wrapped around text.
 
Hi Silver Firefly google can read images from the alt tag just as a screen reader would. h1 around your logo is debateable but you might have your main heading as an image if its an otherwise unavailable font, in which as it makes conplete sense to wrap heading tags around it.
 
There's the age old h1 debate. One thing to do is accessible image replacement using text and an image.

As of now (things change so fast, just a couple weeks ago I was using the method I just linked) I use:

HTML:
<a href="/" title="Return to the home page" id="logo">
	<img src="/img/logo.gif" alt="Site name logo" />
</a>

As semantics suggest that a logo is content and not styling, this should be an inline image.

The best way to visualise headings is in a newspaper format. h1 would be the main headline, h2 sub headlines within that set of content, h3 further sub headings etc etc.

As per the original question, use the description tag as this gives Google a predefined site description on the SERPs and the keywords tag is, as far as research suggests, only used by Yahoo!.
 
That works well Harry!

For the sake of your example should the text in the image not reflect the text you are replacing / covering up though?!

Yours is like technique 8 right? http://css-tricks.com/nine-techniques-for-css-image-replacement/ (levin method) but with the image in the span developed as you said so it will also work with css off and images on... ah but then you get the image and text.... hmmm I'm getting confused now... I thought you had it spot on but not sure...
 
ok ignoring the complex stuff (text and image bit) :) I wasn't intending to add h1 to my brand logo anyways as that isn't what I would have classed as a header (ie chapter 1), I class that as a title (as in book name).

My headers are images as I wanted to do a reflection and at present that isn't available on most browsers using css.

When I've finished playing I'll post it all up for review and let the coding experts burn me alive :)
 
tbwcf said:
That works well Harry!

For the sake of your example should the text in the image not reflect the text you are replacing / covering up though?!

Probably yes, but it all depends on the context.


tbwcf said:
Yours is like technique 8 right? Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement | CSS-Tricks (levin method) but with the image in the span developed as you said so it will also work with css off and images on... ah but then you get the image and text.... hmmm I'm getting confused now... I thought you had it spot on but not sure...

It has the advantage of both in inline image which is still viewable without styles (if it's a logo, you still get the company's logo) and also get text (could be the company name, or anything really) which is spiderable and may increase semantics.

Also, by default most printers won't print background colours/images but they weil do inline images, so you get text and an image when printed.
 
Yes, if you've got text under the image as done with image replacement techniques, then of course you could put heading tags around that. But not around your logo. Your logo is rarely, if not at all, the most important content. It's not semantic.
 
You wouldn't have <h1><img … /></h1>, no. But if you image replace your logo so you have browser text in there and the logo applied using CSS then it's okay.
 
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