We have a lot of calls asking about Meta Tags and how to use them. For those of you who don't know what a Meta Tag is, it is an HTML tag that contains information about your site, page, author, etc., that doesn't actually show up on your page visually.

Certain Meta Tags are used to communicate what your site is all about to search engines. The description and keywords Meta Tags are used to do this.

WebStudio's Web Site Properties dialog's Site Search Info page enables you to enter information that will be put into those Meta Tags. If you enter information into that page, it will put that information into the appropriate Meta Tags on every page in your site. "Every" is the important point here. You may not want the same keywords on each page. If not, here's how to put different info on any and all of your pages.

Go to the page you want to enter your unique Meta Tags on by clicking on its name in the PageList. The Right Click the mouse on the background of the page. Choose Page Properties from the resulting menu. Then click on the Object HTML tab in the dialog. Make sure the Inside Page Header radio button is selected.

Next, you'll enter the actual content of the Meta Tag. Here is a sample Meta Tag for keywords:

‹META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="web studio web page editor"›

The first thing you'd do to enter the Keywords Meta Tag is to determine what keywords you want to add. Refer to our Newsletter Archives to read our three part series on Boosting Search Engine Ranking for more information about choosing Keywords.

Once you determine the keywords you want to use, type the following into the Properties dialog:

‹META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="

Then, on the same line, beside the quote, type all of your keywords followed by:

"›

‹META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="news letter"›

If your keywords were "news" and "letter" it would look like this:

‹META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="news letter"›

Do this for each page in your site. Make sure you use appropriate keywords for each of those pages. Many of them will be the same, but you'll want keywords that are unique and applicable to each page as well. Remember, the reason you'll want to do this is to have different keywords on each page in your site. Oh, and don't enter anything into the Site Properties Web Search Page if you do this. What you enter there will show up on the pages as well, the search engines may get confused by seeing both sets of keywords.