Zoom Search Engine Supported Meta Tags

The Zoom Search Engine indexer supports certain optional meta tags that can be used to fine-tune its performance and options to best suit your site. The meta tags need to be within the <head>...</head> section of the page, in compliance with HTML Standards.

ZOOMCATEGORY

For files which have no easy way to be categorized by a pattern in the filename or URL, you can specify a category for these files on a file-by-file basis. You do this by adding a ZOOMCATEGORY meta tag within your file, like so:

<meta name="ZOOMCATEGORY" content="News">

Specifying the name of the category in the content part of the meta tag. This above example will categorize the file in the "News" category (overriding the URL/filename matching method). You can specify multiple ZOOMCATEGORY tags within the same file if you wish to have the page belonging to more than one category. For example:

<meta name="ZOOMCATEGORY" content="News">
<meta name="ZOOMCATEGORY" content="Old website archive">

ZOOMDESCRIPTION / ZOOMTITLE

In some cases, you may have designed titles and meta descriptions which target Internet-wide search engines. For example, it may be part of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy, in having more generic titles that attract visitors to distinguish your site from another. However, these titles and descriptions may not be so appropriate for the search results within your own website. For example, if every page of your site has a title which begins with "ACME Co. - Leading Provider of Electronic Goods - ... " then your internal search results (served by Zoom) will all look remarkably similar at first glance and hard to tell apart. To avoid this, you can specify alternative titles and descriptions for Zoom to use. This is done by having a ZOOMTITLE and ZOOMDESCRIPTION meta tag.

Here is an example of what you could have in the header of a web page:

<title>ACME Co. - Leading Provider of Electronic Products - Latest News and Announcements</title>
<meta name="description" content="News on ACME manufacturer and distributor of everything from USB sandwiches to Firewire donuts!">
<meta name="ZOOMTITLE" content="Latest News and Announcements">
<meta name="ZOOMDESCRIPTION" content="Find out what's new here at ACME">

ZOOMIMAGE

If you wish to associate a single image with a particular page, you can use the ZOOMIMAGE meta tag to tell Zoom the filename and location of the image file to be displayed for this page. You can do this by inserting a meta tag like the following on your web page:

<meta name="ZOOMIMAGE" content="images/redshoes.jpg">

This will associate the image "redshoes.jpg" in the images folder with the page that this tag is inserted in. This option would be particularly useful for websites where you may have an individual page per product, and you would like a picture of the product to appear along their corresponding pages (or any other website where you may want a single image representing a page).

Note: The path to the image files can be relative or absolute (ie. full http:// URLs). If you are using a relative path, note that the path would be relative to the page that the meta tag was found on. Zoom will automatically resolve this relative path and determine the full absolute path for your image.

If you wish to specify a ZOOMIMAGE meta tag for PDF or other plugin supported file formats, you can do so by creating .DESC files. For more information, see "Using custom description (.desc) files" in the users guide.

Note that the ZOOMIMAGE meta tag has the highest priority over the different image association methods, which means that you can use it to override your thumbnail or icon settings. For example, if you have all PDF files associated with a PDF icon, you can still specify a different image for one particular PDF file, by way of a ZOOMIMAGE tag and a .DESC file as described above.

ZOOMPAGEBOOST

You can also boosts ALL words found on specific pages, by use of the ZOOMPAGEBOOST meta tag, eg.

<meta name="ZOOMPAGEBOOST" content="5">

Putting this on the most important page on your site would help make it appear higher up in the search results. You can probably use less than 5 to do the same thing on a small site. Similarly, a negative value would decrease the weight of words on that page. ZOOMPAGEBOOST values can also range from -5 to 5.

ZOOMWORDS

There is often the need to add words into the index that are not present in the text of the page itself. By doing this it is possible to have search matches on commonly misspelt words and synonyms of words that do appear on the page. Watch the search log closely in order to identify the common words that people are searching for which generate 0 results. These words may be candidates for manual insertion into the index.

To add words into the index for a certain page, you need to create a "ZOOMWORDS" meta-tag in the HTML header of that page. For example, on a page about music, some additional words could be added. It is assumed that these words are not already in the text of the page.

<meta name="ZOOMWORDS" content="melody, mellody, tune, song">

The standard <meta name="keywords"> tag is supported and can also be used. However, note that some external Internet search engines (such as Google) ignore or even penalise a page's rank if they find what they consider to be excessively repeated or misspellings, so the ZOOMWORDS meta-tag is provided to allow you to 'force' page ranks internally, within your own website, without affecting external search engines.

Note: You must check the "Meta keywords" box on the "Indexing Options" tab of the Configuration window in order to enable support for both ZOOMWORDS and Meta keywords.

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