Meta tags are special html tags that are placed in the <head> section of a webpage to provide information about the webpage to a server. The primary servers that use meta tags are search engines. There are many different kinds of meta tags, the two most common being the description and keywords meta tags.
<meta name="description" content="description of this wepage's content">
The description meta tag is used to provide a short description of the wepage's content. Many search engines use the text in description meta tag's content attribute just below the title of the wepage in their search results. Most search engines will truncate this text after about 200 characters, so keep your description short. If the description meta tag is missing, most search engines will use the first 200 characters of text on the webpage as the description in their results.
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, related, webpage, contents">
The keywords meta tag is used to provide keywords related to the webpage's contents. In the early days of the Web, in order to generate more traffic, unscrupulous webmasters stuffed the keywords meta tag with the most popular keywords, like "sex" and "money" even though those keywords had nothing to do with the webpage's content. Today, no self-respecting search engine reads the keywords meta tag, instead they gather keywords from the content of the webpage.
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
The revisit-after meta tag is supposed to tell the search engine how often it should revisit the webpage, however no search engine reads this tag because it's totally unnecessary. Instead the search engine can more reliably determine if the webpage has changed since it's last visit by reading the Last-Modified entity in the HTTP header. Web hosts fill the Last-Modified entity with the last-update time stamp of the file.
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
The robots meta tag is supposed to tell the search engine if it should index the webpage, and if it should follow any links on the webpage (in order to index those pages also). The example robots meta tag tells the search engine to index the webpage and to follow any links on the webpage. The example shown below tells the search engine to index the webpage, but do not follow any links on the webpage.
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">
Shown below are other possible configurations of the robots meta tag.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
Any self-respecting search engine will respect the robots meta tag, but there's no law that says they must comply, and in todays highly competitive search market, every search engine wants to be the one that returns more results than the others. So don't be surprised if you configure a webpage's robots meta tag to noindex, nofollow and still find it's contents fully displayed in search results.
<meta http-equiv="pragma" contents="no cache">
The cache is a folder on the user's hard drive where webpages are stored so that on subsequent visits to the same webpage it can be loaded from the cache and doesn't need to be transported across the Internet. Meta tags with an http-equiv attribute are supposed to be read by the web browser and the keyword pragma tells the browser to follow the instruction in it's contents attribute before doing anything else (in this case to not to store a copy of this webpage in the browser cache). However this metatag does not work with Internet Explorer
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true">
Several years ago, Microsoft decided that their Web browser should tag certain words and phrases on everybody's webpages that they could turn into links to advertising from which Microsoft would earn revenue. After all, this would only constitute a copyright violation if Microsoft didn't own the Web (which, in their mind they do). It didn't take long for all hell to break loose after webmasters learned that their content could be commandeered to generate profit for the giant monopoly.
Under the threat of a massive copyright violation lawsuit, Microsoft came up with the MSSmartTagsPreventParsing meta tag to allow webmasters to protect their work. Every webmaster on the planet immediately implemented the meta tag, which can still today be found on every webpage on the Internet, even though Microsoft never actually implemented the Smart Tags "technology".
<meta name="author" content="Stephen Bucaro">
The author meta tag is another tag that is generally ignored. Actually you can create any kind of meta tags that you desire, as long as they have a name attribute and a content attribute. Servers will read the name attribute, and if they're not interested, they'll ignore the content attribute.
Internet companies utilize many custom meta tags on their webpages for internal content management. Actual search engine servers generally ignore all meta tags because they're there to parse the webpage for only one purpose, and we can't let a little thing like a meta tag stand in the way of generating profit.
More HTML Code:
• Keywords Meta Tag Generator
• Text Features
• HTML Horizontal Rule
• The Font Tag
• Add an Image to a Web Page
• Block and Inline HTML Elements
• Nesting HTML Lists
• HTML Blockquote Basics
• Radio Button Basics
• XHTML Basics