Definition of meta tag

A meta tag is a tag (that is, a coding statement) in the Hypertext Markup Language that describes some aspect of the contents of a Web page. The information that you provide in a meta tag is used by search engines to index a page so that someone searching for the kind of information the page contains will be able to find it. The meta tag is placed near the top of the HTML in a Web page as part of the heading.There are several kinds of meta tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the keywords meta tag and the description meta tag. The keywords meta tag lists the words or phrases that best describe the contents of the page. The description meta tag includes a brief one- or two-sentence description of the page. Both the keywords and the description are used by search engines in adding a page to their index. Some search engines also use the description to show the searcher a summary of the page's contents.Although most search engines also use the contents of a page as a way to determine how to index it, the creator of a Web page should be sure to include meta tags with appropriate keywords and description. Well-written meta tags can help make the page rank higher in search results.

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.

• <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, there is 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.

Other useful points.

There is no need to index every single file that you've got on your site - just choose a few representative samples. The description tag should not simply restate the title of the page, it should describe the page. The tag can also be used in the creation of dynamic documents, and when I've explored this a little bit further, I'll add more information on this.