Meta tags and Keyword usage

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Kent Landfield (kent@landfield.com)
Wed, 4 Feb 1998 14:30:51 -0600 (CST)

First off... Everything here is simply discussion/brainstroming. While I
would like to see something like the following happen at some point, I'd
like it to be an approach acceptable to most everyone. (Chances are this
is just wishful thinking but... ;-) )

I've been getting requests to add META tages to the HTML FAQ pages here.
The intent is to categorize FAQs in such a way as to make the search
engine index databases more accurately reflect the content of the FAQs.
I'm not really sure what a good high level categorization scheme would be.
Initially I went through the FAQ archive and grabbed the Keywords: headers
out to see if the Keywords could be used.

3371 faqs in the archive
965 of them have a Keywords: headers
521 unique 'Keywords: headers' found

(suggesting multipart faqs have a tendency to use the same Keywords: line.)

2735 individual words used in the Keywords: headers
1575 unique individual words used in the Keywords: headers

(FAQ, faq, answer and answers seem to be popular... ;))

The Keywords header could be used for this but I'm sort of hoping for some
agreed to top-level scheme. Because of its previous usage I suspect it would
be difficult to use the Keywords: for this purpose.

I took a look at the FAQ archives and came up with the following. This is a
first cut so please be kind. ;) The idea is to either use an existing header
or create a new header so that automated software could do the right things
depending on the meta-tag keywords the author wanted. The following could be
used as top-level classification categories.

adult
animals
art
audio
autos
aviation
birds
business
comedy
computers
countries
cultures
education
family
fantasy
technology
food
forsale
games
governments
health
history
hobbies
internet
jobs
law
lifestyle
literature
medicine
movies
music
organizations
people
personal
philosophy
politics
privacy
programming
recreation
religion
science
science-fiction
software
sports
travel
tv
universities
the_unknown
us_cities
usenet
weather
writing

It might be useful to have it show subclassifications as well such as

Meta: top-level-classification, second-level-class, subsequent-class

I am aware this is wishful thinking but ... ;) Would it make sense to have
another header that is focused on allowing the author to accurately reflect
the classifications they would like to see their faqs listed under ?

This would assist the search engines and searchers. On top of that, sites
such as faqs.org could present the user with a drill down type of pageset
based on that information.

Thoughts ? (Don't worry, you won't hurt my feelings if this is a bad
idea. :) )

-- 
Kent Landfield                        Phone: 1-817-545-2502             
Email: kent@landfield.com             http://www.landfield.com/
Email: kent@nfr.net                   http://www.nfr.net/
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