Give your webpage a proper, succinct HTML title that describes its content and distinguishes it from other UMBC web documents. The UMBC search engine prominently displays each page's title at the top of each result returned by a successful search query.Additionally, the search engine determines a webpage's relevance per search partially based on words contained in the document's title.
For example, OIT's UMBC RedHat Linux Distribution main page was previously entitled "UMBC RedHat Distribution." This meant that users searching for "Linux" were not likely to find information about the UMBC RedHat Linux release unless they scrolled past a number of other search results representing OIT webpages that did have the word "Linux" in their titles.
Note: A significant number of campus webpages have either no titles or default, generic titles (i.e. "Web Template") If you're using a departmental template, make sure you give your webpage an appropriate title. For instance, instead of using the same generic title for each webpage in a departmental website (UMBC Department of Metaphysics), individual webpages should be given specific titles according to content (UMBC Dept. of Metaphysics: Faculty Roster).
As shown below, HTML titles are placed within the "head" elements of a web document.
Example:
<head>
...
<title>UMBC RedHat Linux Distribution</title>
...
</head>The screenshot below shows a webpage's HTML title (marked in red), as displayed in a search engine "hit."
Like titles, keyword metatags help the search engine determine the content of your webpage. Although keyword metatags aren't exactly essential, they increase the chance that someone searching for certain specified terms will end up at your webpage. Choose one or more keywords that sum up the text of your UMBC webpage -- for example, the keywords "Linux" and "UMBC RedHat" were selected for the UMBC RedHat Linux Distribution page.Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="Linux, UMBC RedHat">
A description metatag allows you to determine exactly what summary text is returned by the search engine when your webpage is listed as a search result. If a description metatag is absent from your webpage, the search engine will attempt to create its own summary by parsing the HTML of your page. Such automatic summaries are often confusing and read like broken English.Use the following example to set up your description metatags.
Example:
<meta name="description" content="A Custom version of RedHat Linux designed for the UMBC community. Includes AFS support.">The screenshot below shows how the search engine displays a metatag description field (marked in red).
When results are presented by the search engine, each "hit" returned is associated with a date. By default, if the search engine can't determine a document's date, it displays the date it last indexed that document -- usually an inaccurate representation of the date a webpage was created/last updated.You can use a date metatag to get the search engine to display a specified date, which can reflect when a document was created or last updated.
Also, including an accurate date metatag in your webpage is important because of the search engine's "Search by Date" option, which allows a user to display search results with the most recent presented first.
Example:
<meta name="date" content="2002-06-25">
The screenshot below shows (marked in red) the date field displayed in a search engine hit.
