Meta Tag

HTML Meta Tags

What are meta tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.Let's see two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth:

<META name=”description” content=”Everything you wanted to know about stamps from prices to history.”>
<META name=”Keywords” content=” stamps, stamp collecting, stamp history, prices, stamp for sale”>

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page's "head" area as noted by the HEAD tag -- it ends at the portion shown as /HEAD.

Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag. Let's talk about what these do.

The Title Tag

The HTML title tag isn't really a meta tag, but it's worth discussing in relation to them. Whatever text you place in the title tag (between the TITLE and /TITLE portions as shown in the example) will appear in the reverse bar of someone's browser when they view the web page.

The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists.

But what about search engines! The title tag is crucial for them. The text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page in your listings.

The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag.

/>

1. name ="description"
   Tells the search engine's spider a description of the page is to follow.
2. content ="How to add meta tags to your page."
   Your very own description of your Web page. Type in what you want the description of your page to be, and use some of your key phrases as part of the description. Many of the search engines use this as the description that will appear in their listings.

The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).

Google ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for this page. Others may support it partially.

In review, it is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some degree of control with various crawlers. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.

The Meta Keywords Tag

The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with your body copy. How does this help you? Well, for most major crawlers, it doesn't. That's because most crawlers now ignore the tag

How to add meta tags to your page

Meta tags are used to help some search engines index your page, especially if your page has frames. Meta tags should be placed between the and tags of your document. The most common meta tags are going to look like this:

/>

1. name="keywords"
   Informs the search engine's spider that a group of keywords should be in this tag.
2. content="meta tags, search, homepage, web sites"
   Your list of keywords and key phrases. In the "keywords" tag, you separate each keyword or key phrase by placing a comma between them.

The meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for ON THE FEW CRAWLERS THAT SUPPORT IT. For instance, if you had a page about stamp collecting -- AND you say the words stamp collecting at various places in your body copy -- then mentioning the words "stamp collecting" in the meta keywords tag MIGHT help boost your page a bit higher for those words.

The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don't appear on the page itself. For instance, let's say you had a page all about the "Penny Black" stamp. You never actually say the word "collecting" on this page. By having the word in your meta keywords tag, then you may help increase the odds of coming up if someone searched for "penny black stamp collecting." Of course you would greater increase the odds if you just used the word "collecting" in the body copy of the page itself.

Other META Tags

The above tags are the two most useful and popular meta tags. There are a couple more that I will mention here, just in case you want to use them.

Author
The Author Tag is for the person who wrote the material for the site.

Subject
The Subject Tag is for what your site is. Business, music, hobby, cars. Use up to 100 characters.

Classification
The Classification tag is similar to description but more in detail.

Geography
Where are you located? Full Address

Language
Is your site in English, Spanish, French.....?

Expires
Use "never" unless your site will expire. (Eg. Tue, 18 Apr 2006 14:57:09 GMT | Note: Requires RFC1123 date as shown here

Copyright
Who is the Owner of the site, Company Name

Zip Code
Your Zip Code

City
Your City, Town

Country
Your Country, use all names; USA, United States, United States Of America, America, etc.

Designer
Webmaster name

Publisher
Owner, Webmaster, Company Names.

Revisit-After
Tell search engine how often this page updates. (Eg. 21 days | Note: Most search engines do not support this Meta Tag)

Distribution
Use [Global] unless it is a [Local] only site.

- Global

- Local

- Internal Use