The <meta> tag is used to present information about an HTML document to browsers, search engines, and other applications. A name meta tag's content can be used to describe a document, the author and define the keywords that a search engine will use while an http-equiv meta tag can redirect visitors to the correct page, describe the character type and content language used on the page. The meta tags on a page are crucial to providing information and controlling how the page is served to your visitors. There are more to meta tags than a series of introductory documents can provide.
It critically important to include <meta> tags in the main documents of your website. If you don't include these tags the search engines will define your site based on their own criteria using the first 256 characters that they find, regardless of what they are. The two main tags for defining your site are;
description - containing a 25 (approximate) word description of your organization.
Example:
<meta name="description" content="The description of your website. There can only be 256 characters including spaces and symbols in the description. Use correct sentence case as this will be the text that convinces visitors to select your site from the search list." />keywords - containing words that interested people will type into a search engine.
Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="first, word, first phrase, add commonly misspelled words here, add relevant words that are not in your document text, don't add non-relevant word" />
Meta tags are also used to control how search engines interact with your web site. Meta tags can direct search engines to ignore certain document and folders. Meta tags can also be used to describe copyright information. Some design software automatically insert meta tags to place advertising on the web page. Meta tags are generally passed over by pirate software.
A meta tag describing the character type and character set is required in a properly formed HTML document.
Example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
Updated December 1, 2007
