What are Meta Tags - FAQ Knowledgebase

HTML and JAVASCRIPT

What are Meta Tags?

--An element of HTML coding on a webpage that is used by search engines, browser software and some other applications to index a webpage. Meta Tag coding are to placed between the 'header' code of a webpage (<head> </head>) and the most important tags are the title, description and keyword tags. Rules used by different search engines govern how such tags are used, how many characters they should contain, and how they should be formatted. But using them will help search engine robot crawlers identify and categorize your website's content.

Here are a few Meta Tag Names that you can implement into your webpage to help optimize your website. Notice not all Meta names need to be used, but like mentioned above it is very important to use the title, description and keyword tags. Also, when using Meta Tags it is a good rule of thumb to help explain the content of the page that the tags reside on and not to falsely add tags that aren't prevalent to the page's content. In other words spamming the search engine with tag information that has nothing to do with your site's content just to get short lived traffic, if any will just result in penalties in the ranking or categorization system of search engine technology and in the worse case scenario have your webpages deleted from their databases.

Title
Description: Title of the web page. Use 2-10 Words which will be your major keywords. Search engines using the “title tag” like your keyword tag. Keep your focus on two or four keywords.

Attribute:
<meta name="title" content="text">
Set "text" to the web page title.

Example:
<meta name="title" content="What are Meta Tags FAQ Knowledgebase">

Description
Description: Some search engines pick up this description to show
with the results of searches that a user makes through search engine
databases, like a Goggle or MSN.

Attribute:
<meta name="description" content="text">
Include your description of the site or page in the "text" field. Maximize your search engine ranking and put your major keyword in the description.

Example:
<meta name="description" content="Woot Hosting is a site providing low cost web hosting and important webmaster information.">

Keywords
Description: Spiders use the keyword tag to categorize your webpage.
Use keywords or phrases that you have used in your title tag and add
a few keywords and phrases used in the body of the webpage itself.
Try to avoid using a keyword more then 3 times in this tag as this
may be considered as spam. Resulting in penalties against you with
the search engine robots.

Attribute:
<meta name="keywords" content="list">
"list" is the list of keywords and phrases seperated by commas.
Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="meta tag help,meta tag information">

Author
Description: Name or legal entity of the documents author

Attribute:
<meta name="author" content="name">
Set "name" to the name or legal entity of the author of the document. Seperate multiple authors with commas.

Example:
<meta name="author" content="Woot Hosting Staff">

Publisher
Description: Name or legal entity of the documents publisher

Attribute:
<meta name="publisher" content="name">
Set "name" to the name or legal entity of the publisher of the document. Seperate multiple authors with commas.

Example:
<meta name="publisher" content="the publisher">

Company name
Description: Company or individual operating the website. (This is not the hosting company!)

Attribute:
<meta name="company" content="name">
Company or individual operating the website. Seperate multiple authors with commas.

Example:
<meta name="author" content="Ivan Marak">

Copyright
Description: Used to include copyright information in the document.Type in the company or individual name in any form applicable.

Attribute:
<meta name="copyright" content="name">
Use "text" to define the copyright owner of the document.

Example:
<meta name="copyright" content="WootHosting.net Copyright © 2005, All Rights Reserved">

E-mail
Description: E-mail address for question regarding this site. This e-mail address is also used by some search engines to confirm you submission. Warning: Expect to receive SPAM mail on this account !!!

Attribute:
<meta name="reply-to" content="e-mail address">
Set "e-mail address" to a valid e-mail address from your company.

Example:
<meta name="reply-to" content="submission@woothosting.net">

Language
Description: Specifies the language of the document. Used to categorize documents by language.

Attribute:
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="lang">
Indicates the language of the document.

Example:
<meta name="content-language" content="en">
Set the content language to English

Content language
Description: Specifies the language of the content, which is relevant for the browser. i.e. to download a font.

Attribute:
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="lang">
Indicates the language of the keyword.

Example:
<meta name="content-language" content="en-gb">
Set the content language to English (English-Great Britain)

Last modification date
Description: Date when the meta data elements were last updated.

Attribute:
<meta name="metatagupdate" content="DATE">
Set "DATE" Wdy, DD-Mon-YYYY HH:MM:SS GMT as described from RFC 822, RFC 850, RFC 1036, and RFC 1123.

Example:
<meta name="metatagupdate" content="Mon, 21 Aug 2005 15:39:34 GMT">

Page expires
Description: Expiration date of the document. A date in the past will disable caching of the document.

Attribute:
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="date">
Set "DATE" Wdy, DD-Mon-YYYY HH:MM:SS GMT as described from RFC 822, RFC 850, RFC 1036, and RFC 1123.
Note that "0" is considered an invalid date - this probably is an error condition.

Example:
<meta http-equiv="expires" CONTENT="Mon, 21 Aug 2005 15:39:34 GMT">

Page topic
Description: Page subject. Search engines to classify your web page.

Attribute:
<meta name="page-topic" content="text">
Set "text" to the page subject.

Example:
<meta name="page-topic" content="Meta Tag help">

Page type
Description: Classify your web page.

Attribute:
<meta name="page-type" content="text">
Set "text" to the appropriate classification.

Example:
<meta name="page-type" content="Information">

Rating
Description: Describes your page audience.

Attribute:
<meta name="rating" content="text">

Example:
<meta name="rating" content="All">

Audience
Description: Intended Audience.

Attribute:
<meta name="audience" content="text">
Set "text" to the intended audience.

Example:
<meta name="audience" content="General">

Robots
Description: Exclude some page from indexing, if you need what is and is not indexed on your site, use the more widely recognized robots.txt file.

Attribute:
<meta name="robots" content="text">

Example:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

Content can consist of:

index = Index the page
noindex = Do not index the page
follow = Follow the links from the page
nofollow = Do not follow the links from the page
noimageindex = Prevents the images on the page from being indexed