How does Website Tagging Work?

Work on algorithm in the vintage computer lab

How does Website Tagging Work?

 

Site tagging, as you already know, is about putting the right HTML commands in the right place. The difficulties come in knowing what types of tags to use and what to include in those tags. The basic tags- title, heading, body, and meta tags-should be included in every page that you want a search engine to find.

 

 

But to make these tags readable to the search engine crawlers, they should be formatted properly. For example, with container tags, you should have both an opening and a closing tag. The opening tag is usually bracketed with two sharp brackets (<tag>). The closing tag is also bracketed, but it includes a slash before the tag to indicate that the container is closing (</tag>). Notice that the tag name is repeated in both the opening and closing tags. This just tells the crawler or web browser where a specific type of formatting or attribute should begin and end. So, when you use the <b>Bold</b> tag, only the words between the opening and closing tags will be formatted with a bold-faced font, instead of the entire page being bold.

 

 

There’s another element of web-site design that you should know and use. It’s called cascading style sheets (CSS) and it’s not a tagging method, but rather a formatting method. You should use CSS so that formatting tags are effective strictly in formatting, while the other tags actually do the work needed to get your site listed naturally by a search crawler.

 

 

Think of cascading style sheets as boxes, one stacked on top of another. Each box contains some- thing different, with the most important elements being in the top box and decreasing to the least important element in the bottom box. With cascading style sheets, you can set one attribute or for- mat to override another under the right circumstances.

 

 

We won’t go into creating cascading style sheets in this book. There’s enough to learn about that to fill at least two additional books, and in fact dozens have been written about them.

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