Meta tag definition - Meta tag advice

Html meta tags are additional "key words" of a web page that provide information about a web document (adding them on a web document is not mandatory but highly recommended). Meta tags are defined in the header section of a html document (between <head> and </head>). Following are given some more meta tag definition and meta tag advice but to avoid confusion, you should know that the tag <TITLE> is not part of the meta tag definition.

Why ask for meta tag advice ?

Even if some search engines don't support meta tags, the main engines and directories do. Meta tag optimisation can ensure that search engines supporting metatags are using the meta tag definition to addition of the title as an abstract to be displayed on search engine result pages. For search engines not supporting meta tags, the first words of the page content are used as the abstract of the page. Meta tags keywords (cf after) are used to match a specific search engine search to your website. Using meta tags is not a miraculuous solution to making your website reach the highest rankings. It will provide a quality indexation and display for your website upon search engine searches. Not adding meta tags could lead search engines and directories to not list your site at all.

Meta tag definition types ?

Two types of meta tags can be identified, the ones with a "name" attribute and the ones with a "http-equiv" attribute. In both cases, the meta element allows specification of a property (declared from the name or from the http-equiv attribut) and then matches a value to it.

With the NAME attribute :

Among the different types of properties available from the name attribute can be found the properties "author", "date", "copyright", "keywords", "description", "robots"... Definitly the most important ones to consider with search engine indexation are "keywords" and "description".

Some of the common NAME attributes are :

author - The tag author is used to specify the author of the web page.
Example : <meta name="AUTHOR" content="ToImproveLife">
keywords - The tag keywords is used to suggest words (keywords) that are describing the web page. Ideally, these keywords are the ones that people will most likely search through search engines. Each keyword is usually separated by commas, but there are no defined rules on this point.
Example : <meta name="KEYWORDS" content="meta tag advice, meta tag definition">
description - The tag description is used to specify the description of your web page. It is the one used by main search engines in the pages resulting from a search engine search.
Example : <meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="description">
robots - The tag robots lets you define if you want your web page to be indexed by search engines or not.
Example : <meta name="ROBOTS" content="index,follow">

Note :

noindex / index : will indicate that this page should not / should be indexed.
nofollow / follow : will indicate to robots, spiders not / to follow links.

With the HTTP-EQUIV attribute :

The http-equiv attribute has significance only when pages are retrieved via HTTP protocol, which is usually the case on a standard website.

Some of the common http-equiv attributes used are :

Expires - The tag Expires can be used to determine when a fresh copy of a document should be reloaded.
Example : <meta http-equiv="EXPIRES" content="Tue, 24 Aug 2004 14:00:00 GMT">
Content-Type - The tag Content-Type can be used to define the encoding for a document.
Example : <meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-5">
Pragma - The tag Pragma prevents Netscape Browsers from caching a page.
Example : <meta http-equiv="PRAGMA" content="no-cache">
Refresh - This tag Refresh allows the browsers to reload a document with a time indicated in seconds.
Example : <meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="1;URL=http://www.url-after-1-s.com">

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Conclusion

Meta tag definition can be beneficial for a html page. If you want your website to be nicely indexed with search engines and directories, add different meta tags for EACH page of your web site. I hope you will have learnt from this meta tag advice page.