MetaTags

META Tags

META tags are useful and can help your web site attract visitors more effectively.

Using META tags you can identify the creator of the page, the HTML specs, keywords and description of your page and refresh parameters - and these are just a few of it's common uses.

META HTTP-EQUIV tags are basically the same as HTTP headers. Some servers actually convert these META headers into regular HTTP headers. This can tell your browser what to expect and help interpret the web page.

Refresh
The refresh tag loads a URL after a specified time. This can either be used to refresh a page or take the user to a different page. (Quotes are required on the entire Content part.)

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.usd.edu/trio/tut">

Expires

<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 26 Feb 1997 08:21:57 GMT">

must be in the RFC840 (GMT) format

Pragma

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">

works with Netscape but not Internet Explorer

Set-Cookie

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Set-Cookie" CONTENT="cookievalue=xxx;expires=Wednesday, 21-Oct-98 16:14:21 GMT; path=/">

If you use an expiration date, the cookie is considered permanent and will be saved to disk (until it expires), otherwise it will be considered valid only for the current session and will be erased upon closing the Web browser.

Window-target

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Window-target" CONTENT="_top">

Forces the Web browser to display the page in the "named window."

Keywords

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword, important, names, stored, here">

Description

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This page is about META tags and how to use them">

ROBOTs

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="all | none | index | noindex | follow | nofollow">

all - indexes all of the files none - tells the robot to not index any files or hyperlinks noindex - tells the robot to not index this page follow - tells the robot that it should follow the links to other pages nofollow - tells the robot that it should not follow the links to other pages all robots do not follow these rules

META NAME tags are

   <META NAME=name-of-meta-data CONTENT="content of meta data">

So if you wanted to indicate the author of the document you could write:

The META tags should always be placed within the HEAD tags.

META tags are not to be misleading. You should not type names that do not relate to your pages.

PICS generator

   <HEAD>
        ...
        <META NAME=author CONTENT="Mr. Squiggle">
        ...
        </HEAD>

You can have as many different META tags as you like, one for each bit of meta information you want to include with the document.

Note that the values for the meta data NAME attribute are not standardized. Different applications may make use of different names. The values that AltaVista uses are:

description: the description text that is shown when the page is returned as a result of a search.
keywords: keywords that the page will be indexed on (in addition to the words in the document itself).

They give an example of a page with:

<META name="description" content="We specialize in grooming pink poodles.">
<META name="keywords" content="pet grooming, Palo Alto, dog">

and explain:

AltaVista will then do two things:

It will index both fields as words, so a search on either poodles or dog will match.

It will return the description with the URL. In other words, instead of showing the first couple of lines of the page, a match will look like the following:

Pink Poodles Inc

We specialize in grooming pink poodles.
http://pink.poodle.org/ - size 3k - 29 Feb 96

AltaVista will index the description and keywords up to a limit of 1,024 characters.

Tutorial by WebDeveloper.com

6171

Site Description (more descriptive the better)
Up to 10 Keywords (separated with spaces)
	Here is your META - tag coding. Put it in the HEAD of your HTML document.