Meta tags are HTML tags which provide information that describes the content of the webpage a user will be viewing.

Meta tags have two possible attributes:

a)

b)

(Note: I have used my name and my links in many of the examples below. Don’t forget to put your own name and description there.)

a) HTTP-EQUIV Tags

Meta tags with an HTTP-EQUIV attribute are equivalent to HTTP headers. Typically, they control the action of browsers, and may be used to refine the information provided by the actual headers. They are:-

Expires

The date and time after which the document should be considered expired.

Content-Type

This gives the character set.

Content-Script-Type

Specifies the default scripting language in a document.

Content-Style-Type

Specifies the default stylesheet language for the document.

Content-language

Used to declare the natural language of the document. May be used by robots to categorize by language. Languages are specified as the pair (language-dialect); here below, English-British (en-GB)

Refresh

Specifies a delay in seconds before the browser automatically reloads the document. Optionally, specifies an alternative URL to load.

Pragma

This tag tells IE not to cache the page.

b) NAME attributes

Meta tags with a name attribute are used for other types which do not correspond to HTTP Headers. They are:-

Robots

Controls web robots on a per-page basis, whether to index a page or not (index/noindex), and whether to follow links on the page or not (follow/nofollow). You can use these in any combination you want.

- index, follow – Default value. Page will be indexed, and links on the page will be followed.

- index, nofollow – Page will be indexed, but any links on the page will not be followed.

- noindex, follow – Page will not be indexed, but links on the page will be followed.

- noindex,nofollow – Page will not be indexed, and links on the page will not be followed.

Description

A short, plain language description of the document. Keep it short and to the point.

Keywords

Keywords are used by search engine to index our document in addition to words from the title and document body. It lets you specify keywords people might use when looking for your site. Enter as many as you can think of, but don’t repeat each word more than once.

Author

The author’s name.

Copyright

A copyright statement.

Rating

A way to say that your site is family safe.

Revisit-after

This tells the search engine to come back again and re-index your site every 10 days (in case of this example)

Distribution

Classification

What kind of directory heading does this come under.

Reply-to

Enjoy!!!