Anatomy of a web page

The code that produced the previous page is ...

Anatomy of a url

A Presentation To The College For Seniors

Genealogy

Internet

College

Seniors

Anatomy of a url

Consists of several parts
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You might notice the following about the previous listing...

Words inside the < > are called tags. Tags usually occur in pairs such as <BODY> (begin the body of the page) and </BODY> (end the body of the page). Tags are not displayed. They only tell the web browser (such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer) how to display the words between the tags.

The tags <HTML> and </HTML> indicate that this is a HyperText Markup Language representation of information. Hypertext markup language is a set of rules about how to display, layout, and format the document.

Words in the head of the document (between the tags <HEAD> and </HEAD>) supply information to the web browser and search engines. Only the title of the document (between the tags <TITLE> and </TITLE> is displayed by the web browser. The title is displayed in the blue bar at the top of the web page.

Most search engines use the words within the <META> tags to categorize the page. Some search engines will also look for keywords in the body (between the tags <BODY> and </BODY>) of the HTML document.

Words in graphical images (such as IMG SRC="graphics/url01.gif") are not visible to search engines and will not be used to categorize the page.

The primary web search engines (some of which are listed on the next page) are unable to see and catalog information in databases. To find out if your ancestor is listed in the database of a site like RootsWeb, you need to use the RootsWeb search engine.

Comments and suggestions should be sent to:

email: sturges@iastate.edu
phone: 515-294-6242.