What are Meta Tags and why are they important?

What are Meta Tags ?

Meta Tags use the meta element and attributes to provide detailed information ( metadata ) about the web document. The most frequently used attributes are; content, robots, author, description, and keywords. The Meta Tags must be placed in the <head> element of the web document.

Meta Tag samples


1. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
2. <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
3. <meta name="Author" content="your name" />
4. <meta name="description" content="web documents description" />
5. <meta name="keywords" content="web documents, keywords" />

Why are Meta Tags important ?

Meta Tags provide search engines with important information about the web document.

In the 1st Meta Tag sample above meta http describes the web documents "Content-Type" with the content= attribute. The value of the content= attribute is "text/html". This value describes the web document as html text.

In the 2nd Meta Tag sample meta name= there are two attributes "robots" and "index,follow". The robots attribute describes the target search engines. The index,follow tells the search engines to index the page and follow or index all linked pages on the domain. To tell the search engine not to follow or index a web document you would use no-follow.

In the 3rd Meta Tag sample meta name= there are two attributes "Author" and "your name". The Author attribute tells the search engines the Author of the web document. The second attribute "your name" is used to describe the web documents Author or Company Name.

In the 4th Meta Tag sample meta name= there are two attributes "description" and "web documents description". The description attribute tells the search engine it's a description. The "web documents description" is used to describe the contents of the web document. This description is visible with the web page title to visitors when they search the net.

In the 5th Meta Tag sample meta name= there are two attributes "keywords" and "web documents, keywords". The keywords attribute tells the search engine it's keywords. The web documents, keywords describes the keywords in the web document. The keywords are used by visitors when they search the net.


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