This hour teaches you how to provide hints to search engines (such as HotBot, Alta Vista, Lycos, Infoseek, etc.) so that people can find your pages more easily on the Internet. It also shows you how to make a page remember its own address, and how to make a page load another page automatically after a timed delay.
(View HTML tags covered in Hour 22.)
Fractal Central(Figures 22.1 - 22.2)
There's nothing wrong with this page, but it presents some problems to people who might try to find it from an Internet search site. There are several things you could do to improve the chances of this page appearing high on a search engine results list.
Fractal Central II(Figures 22.3 - 22.4)
This page will be easier for people interested in fractals and chaos to find. I added some important search terms to the <TITLE> tag and the first heading on the page, added <META> tags to assist some search engines with a description and keywords, added an ALT attribute to the first <IMG> tag, took out the quote marks around technical terms (some search engines consider "fractal" to be a different word than fractal), and added the keyword "fractal" twice to the text in the order form box. I also rearranged the table so this box didn't appear in the HTML code before the <H1> heading or the main body text, since search sites give special importants to words occuring early in the HTML document.
New Arrival Notice(Figures 22.5 - 22.8)
The <META> tag in this example causes the Web browser to automatically load another page after 5 seconds. Some very old Web browsers don't recognize <META> refresh tag so you should always put a normal link on the page leading to the same address.
The page that loads automatically also happens to include a <BASE> tag, which explicitly specifies the online location of the page. <BASE> is seldom used, since it causes all image and link addresses on the page to act as though the page was at the specified base location online, even if you are testing a copy of the page on your hard drive.
The home page of this site includes <META NAME="description"> and <META NAME="keywords"> tags to help search engines list it favorably. When you peek at the source, note how the keywords have been carefully chosen to match the intended audience, including a common misspelling of the feature artist's name. The page also includes two <META> keyword tags in obsolete formats still required by some minor search sites.
"Some over-eager Web page authors put dozens or even hundreds of repetitions of the same word on their pages, sometimes in small print or a hard-to-see color, just to get the search engines to sort that page to the top of the list whenever someone searched for that word. This practice is called search engine spamming. Don't be tempted to try this sort of thing, because all the major search engines immediately delete any page from their database that sets of a 'spam detector' by repeating the same word or group of words in a suspicious pattern. It's still fine (and quite beneficial) to have several occurences of important search words on a page. Just use the words in normal sentences or phrases, and the spam police will leave you alone."
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