Watchfire Metabot 3 Metabot 3.0 Makes Small Work Of Metatags! Douglas Smith
Internet Websites are popping up like daisies, and just about all ISPs offer at least 3 MB disk space for this purpose. Building these sites is as easy as driving to the corner store, but building them right--and getting visitors--is a different story. A good search engine ranking to bring eyeballs means spending some time maintaining the site's meta-tags, those little HTML hints that help many search engines decide how to list it.
Watchfire out of Ottawa, Canada has a real solution for easily maintaining and handling all those metatags. It's called Metabot 3.0, a tool for creating, inserting, and testing metatags. It allows companies and small businesses to analyze the content and metadata used on a web site, delivering its analysis through detailed web-based reports to key ebusiness stakeholders. This is done via wizards that automatically generate and manage metadata for a variety of documents. Any web author can benefit from using this tool to help analyze and optimize all the metatags, while ensuring compliance with standards.
This is where it becomes important to build your website right. Most web sites today are thrown together with no real adherence to standards. Online information can be retrieved much more easily with search engines, on both websites and company intranets, through the consistent use of metatags. Metabot 3.0 uses a spreadsheet style layout to allow easy insertion and maintenance of meta-tags across an entire site. It is also able to FTP pages via the internet, a nice built-in feature for those who don't already host a website. The Noise List feature specifies which keywords to exclude from the keyword list created after scanning anyselected HTML files.
Integration of Metabot 3.0 with other editors is very good; it works quite well with some of the better editors on the market such as Allaire's HomeSite, Macromedia's Dreamweaver, and Microsoft's FrontPage, to mention a few. Launch the wizard and edit the entire site or just a single page while you create your HTML documents--a great time saver. We mentioned the web-based reports earlier without going into detail, but we will note that it can customize reports based on what an organization really wants. It displays what standards are in use, and also makes suggestions for correcting problems before it is too late.
