I am trying to authenticate my web site and am being asked to add a meta tag to my home page?

Question

I have no idea how to do this - it says to add it to in the first section of the page, before the section but I have no idea where that is. The other choice is to copy a HTML file but I don't know where to do that either. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

If you have a website, you should have several HTML files (which end in .html or .htm) which you have uploaded to your web server (either via FTP yourself or via your web editing program---FrontPage for example).

The most obvious exception to this rule is if you're using a template-based site designer like GeoCities or something like that. In this case, the program or website you are using is generating the HTML files for you, you just don't get to see them by default. If this is the case, you'll need to find the part of said website that allows you to manually edit the HTML files, and proceed as described from there.

Now, a (very) brief intro to HTML programming:

Every element in HTML that the web browsers use to determine how to lay out your site is contained in what is called a "tag". This tag can be and to make text bold, or it can be an tag to place an image on your page. Point is, everything is a tag, and is contained in tags. If it is a single item, like an image, it will just have the one tag, for example:


or


(the slash / before the > is sometimes used depending on what version of HTML you're writing---look at the rest of the tags and if you see ones with /> then you should use the /> too, otherwise just stick with the >)

Other tags surround blocks of code, and change how that whole block looks, like so:

(...other code goes here...)

Notice this is actually two tags, one starting tag and one ending tag . Your whole webpage will contain a few required basic tags. The first one is and , which tell the browser where the actual webpage itself starts. The opening tag should be at or near the very beginning of your file, and the closing tag should be at or near the very end.

The tag will have two large blocks inside it, one ... and one .... The section contains information about the webpage that isn't actually part of the page itself, but tells the browser information it uses when it's loading/displaying the page: the title that appears in the title bar for example () or who wrote the webpage ( or some such). The other big block, is not one you're worried about right now; it contains the actual page itself.

End crash course in HTML programming.

So now you're going to open up your HTML file (probably index.html or index.htm) in a plaintext editor---use Notepad if the file is on your hard drive or use whatever tools is provided for manual editing of the files if you're using a template-based service like GeoCities. You might have to download the HTML file from your webserver via FTP to edit it if you use FrontPage or something like that...instructions for that are beyond the realm of this question though so I'll leave that for you to figure out if that's what you need to do.

So anyways, you're looking at the source code to your index.html or index.htm file now. It should look SOMETHING like this (although there will be significant changes and stuff missing, it should have these basic components):







...



So look for the section, and particularly look to see if there are already some tags in this section. If there are, just make a new line after them and put yours in (you know; the one provided by the service that is "authenticating" your site---whatever that means). If there aren't any other META tags already in this section, just make a new line anywhere between the and tags and stick it in there.

Note that if you use FrontPage or some other editing software, they can make really messy code. Whitespace is not relevant in HTML coding, so tabs, newlines, spaces, and whatnot are completely ignored by the browser (with a few exceptions you don't need to worry about for this question). So you might have to hunt through some spaghetti code to find the and part of your website---they might not be on their own line. In fact, they could possibly be even on the same line with all the code in between them on the same line too and it would still be a valid HTML document. So happy hunting, and I hope this answers your question!

Answer 2

Yes. These are what the search engines read to understand what your web page is about. This week I showed a company that the reason the search engines could not find their website was because there were zero meta tags - it was all Flash. Flash is fine if it is supported with the proper code. No code = no indexing. How do I know? We have held page 1, top 5 results in Google and Yahoo for the same key word terms for over two years. This is despite the constant changes in algorithyms.

Answer 3

Add the tag and then . In between those tags, add words or phrases seperated with a comma (,). This allows search engines to find your website by looking for specific words or phrases (hence meta tag). It reduces search time for the search engine by not making it scan your entire site for words and key phrases.

Answer 4

This is what I prefix all of my web pages with. I have added an extra space after http to keep it from displaying as a link here. There is also a space after the second DTD to get it to print right. Remove these spaces.

"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http ://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD /xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Answer 5

You should try Google sometime