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Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom | Margaret Batschelet

The Keywords Value

The keywords value assigns a set of keywords to describe the page content. These keywords then become one way in which search engines categorize and index the page. The format is:
<meta name="keywords" content="teaching writing, HTML, code, exercises">.

Why Should You Teach It?

The most fundamental question writers of web pages face is the same one faced by any writer: who should read my work and why? On the web, keywords become one way of placing pages so that the intended audience can find them; without the right keywords, pages run the risk of being misindexed by search engines, or not being indexed at all. On his Search Engine Watch site, Danny Sullivan suggests that "target keywords should always be at least two or more words" and further that these keywords should appear somewhere in the page title or body, as well as in the keywords value. Asking students to generate keywords can lead to reflections on audience, on what web readers might be looking for when they come to a site, and on which particular words on a page best characterize both the page's content and the overall content of the site itself. Additionally, keywords can be used in discussions of purpose; if a student cannot find satisfactory keywords within the page's content, it may be that the content does not accomplish her purpose in writing the page in the first place.

In my experience, the initial response to a keyword-generating exercise may be a miscellaneous laundry list of terms intended to reach the widest possible audience. Having students work together in pairs to refine and target keyword lists could help them to refine their own ideas of audience, and to consider whether the contents of the page will, in fact, accomplish the purpose that the authors intended and reach the readers they wanted.

Citation Format: Batschelet, Margaret. "Learning To Love the Code: HTML As a Tool in the Writing Classroom." The Writing Instructor. 2004. http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/batschelet/ (Date Accessed).
Review Process: Margaret Batschelet's hypertext was accepted for publication following blind, peer review.