Meta tags are used to supply information for search engines that won't be seen by the web surfer unless they were to view your web site's HTML. Historically, meta tags were a primary way for your site to be recognized by web spiders, but the net community abused the meta tags to artificially increase their ranking in the search engine databases. Nevertheless, you ought to still include meta for those search bots that do recognize them, permit your site to be included in their search engine.
Keywords Meta Tag
Keywords or phrases are placed in this meta tag's content attribute. You ought to specify the most popular search terms you believe somebody would use to reach your web-site. A few years back, you could spam this meta tag with any and every keyword possible to gain ranking on search engines. Repeated words, or words that do not pertain to the content of the site won't benefit you or those using a search engine. Here's an example of proper usage for a site.
HTML Code:
<head>
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword, key keywords, etc" />
</head>
name defines what kind of meta tag being used. Note that words are separated by commas.
An example of meta tag keywords Tizag.com would be as follows.
HTML Code:
<head>
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, XHTML, CSS, tutorials, tizag" />
</head>
Description Meta Tag
As you might have guessed, this tag will show a brief description of the net page to a search engine. Your description should be a sentence or six about your web-site. Keywords that appeared in the keyword meta tag should appear here as well.
HTML Code:
<head>
<meta name="description" content="Tizag contains webmaster tutorials." />
</head>
Description and Keywords tags are similar, and they ought to be. As mentioned above if they do not match, you may be ignored or blocked by some search engines. Be careful.
Revised Meta Tag
The revised meta tag records when the last update was done to the site.
HTML Code:
<head>
<meta name="revised" content="Happy New Year: 1/1/2003" />
</head>
Refresh Page and Redirect
Later down the road, you may need to redirect traffic to another domain. A common reason might be that you have purchased a better domain name & would like to retain your elderly visitors, yet still use your new domain. With the refresh meta tag you will be able to redirect visitors to the world wide web-site of your choice.
HTML Code:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10; url=http://www.tizag.com" />
</head>
Above shows refreshing Tizag homepage every 10 seconds. A quick update may be necessary for news, stocks, or at any other sensitive information. The most common use for this type of meta tag, however, is the funnel. To redirect a viewer automatically alter the new site URL as shown below. This code will send your visitors to espn.com after being in place at one seconds.
HTML Code:
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=http://www.espn.com" />
</head>
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