What are meta tags?
The Meta tag in html is not a required tag when you’re creating your web
pages; many pages don’t use the tag at all, and I must confess that I’ve not
used it on my home page, although I put it into this page by way of
demonstration. To put it briefly, the meta tag is used by search engines to
allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. Sometimes.
If you simply produce your home page and register the URL with a search
engine, or a number of search engines, their spider programmes will
(eventually) toddle along to your site to index it. Now, each of the search
engines does this slightly differently. Altavista for example will grab
everything in your document and index it, but will only show the first 250
characters in its description. Consequently, if your site included say,
‘Thanks to:….’ right at the beginning, this is what Altavista would show in
its description, and it wouldn’t give the viewer any idea of what your site
actually covered. Of course, not all search engines work this way; I’d
suggest you ferret around a little bit to see exactly how the popular
engines work, and certainly the major two or three such as Altavista,
Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and Excite. It therefore makes sense to ensure that
your opening paragraph is carefully written to ensure it accurately reflects
what your site covers.
However, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how
your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. (I should however point
out that not all search engines will use this tag – Altavista does, but Excite
doesn’t, for example. Its not a total cure-all therefore, but you won’t miss
out by putting the tag in, and it may well work well in some cases.
What does a meta tag look like?
You should insert the meta tag element at the top of your document, just
after the <TITLE> element. It follows the usual form of tags, ie
<META name=”something” content=”something else”>
but note that you don’t have to have a </META> at the end of the tag, the
way that you do with something like <BOLD> bold </BOLD>. However,
make sure that each tag does not include any line breaks, since some
search engines get a little bit tetchy about this.
What can I include in a meta tag?
There are basically four major meta tags that you can use:
* <META name=”resource-type” content=”document”>
The only resource type that is currently in use is “document” This is the
only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but use of the
others is a good idea.
Notes – 9
<META name=”description” content=”a description of your page”>
Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title
of your page in an index. “content” could be a word, sentence or even
paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and
to the point. However, don’t be so mean with your description that its not
an appropriate reflection of the contents!
<META name=”keywords” content=”a, list, of, keywords”>
Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by
commas. Remember to include synoyms, americanisms and so on. So, if
you had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as car,
cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.
<META name=”distribution” content=”one of several”>
Content should contain either global, local or iu (for Internal Use). To be
perfectly honest, I can’t quite get my head around this one; its supposed to
list available resources designed to allow the use to find things easily, but
I still don’t quite get it. My advice is to stick to “global”.
Are there optional tags?
Yup, theres a whole bunch of ‘em. I’ve put in a couple of examples below:
<META name=”copyright” content=”copyright statement”
Pretty obvious what this one’s for.
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”varname” content=”data”
This binds the varname to an HTTP header field. An http server might use
this to process a document. This one’s a tad more tricky.If you included
the following example:


<META HTTP-EQUIV=”keywords” content=”car,cars”
then, as part of a GET command the server would include the word car
and cars in the HTTP response header.
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”0; url=homepage.htm”
This can be used in the HEAD section of the index.html file to redirect it
to homepage.htm. The figure after content is the time in seconds that the
browser waits before moving on.
There are a few others that you can include, such as “revisit-after” and
“rating” if you want to be really comprehensive.

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