January 16, 2005

FrontPage Tools for Meta Tags

DEAR TINA: At the moment I am opening each page to edit this line on the code page: (meta name="description" content="Fill in the content.")

1. Is there a tool that would make the review of the description meta tag easy?

2. Also, is there a tool that can give me a report of this meta tag per page?

Jane

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Meta Tag FrontPage Addons

DEAR JANE: There are plenty of tools available.

Question 1.

D2Stuff has many other addons within the same app, not free but there is a trial and is quite cheap considering what else you get ... the prices may go up soon.

MetaData Editor - This is free and for 98, 2000 and 2002 only it's quite old.

PowerMeta - by Jimco which comes with a lot of other stuff, similar to rankpal somewhat. (PowerMeta is free with Jim's book which is well worth every
penny btw) otherwise you buy there is a Trial

Meta Tag Maker 2004 by websunlimted

Note: Using third party meta tag addons will at the present time mess up your dwt coding for your meta tags, so just use the tool and copy and paste the content as below.

See this two part article for more info on dwt's. (Dynamic Web Templates)

( http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/fp_techniques/dwt-1.htm and http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/fp_techniques/dwt-2.htm )

I also have a free ebook available which is updated DWT Ebook

With FrontPage 2003 you can now right click and choose page properties and insert content into title keywords and description right away.

Question 2.

Originally I did have a Free FrontPage Addon to tell you about but this has now been discontinued.

January 08, 2005

Stop FrontPage displaying 20% in Links

DEAR TINA: How can I stop FrontPage from displaying my page URLs with 20%, instead of > just www.xxxx.com/page??

Denise

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Spaces in files names

DEAR DENISE: You would need to rename your files for example red20%widget.htm should be changed to red-widget.htm

NOTE: When you make a file and leave a space FrontPage will automatically insert the 20% to denote there is a space.

For SEO purposes using a dash for the space is the best rather than a underscore _. This is because search engine bots 'see' your keywords for example Red Widget when put together redwidget is one keyword when and underscore is used red_widget is also one keyword as the bots don't 'see' the underscore. On the other hand if a dash is used red-widget this is seen and they keyword becomes two. This is a small part of the overall picture but an important one in SEO optimization.

There is a Free FrontPage addon that can get rid of the spaces in your file names throughout your site automatically, however it will insert an underscore. So your red20%widget.htm becomes red_widget.htm for SEO purposes this is no good as
redwidget becomes one keyword not two.

If you are going to rename a page merely by getting rid of the 20% and changing it for a dash, it still means it's a complete change of file name to the search engine's so you need to use a 301 redirect for your older files to the newer files, (make sure the content is not duplicated by leaving content on your old file names).

This is best solution, if you can't manage that using a redirect meta tag on the old file is something you can do at the very least. - Make sure if your using a navigation view that you take out the old file and put in the new and that after all your changes you recalculate hyperlinks under Tools as well. Since you have to rename file names, it's a good time to think more about the SEO content of the file names. file names title h1 tag and content should all reflect each
other. For more on SEO check out this free seo class