Meta Tags – Meta tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. Meta information basically deals with browser. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what “character set” to use like UTF-8 character encoding also for redirection purpose.
For character encoding - <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> For current page refresh <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="500"> For redirection on other page or website <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://www.smartcoderszone.com">
http-equiv=”refresh” – This attribute tells the browser that this meta tag is sending an HTTP command rather than a standard meta tag. Refresh is an actual HTTP header used by the Web server. It tells the server that the page is going to be reloaded or sent somewhere else.
content=”500″ – This is the amount of time, in seconds, until the browser should reload the current page.
There are two most common types of meta tag (with respect to search engine). The basic syntax of meta tag has been described below:
<head> <title>Meta tags</title> <meta name="description" content="Use of meta tags" /> <meta name="keywords" content="meta, meta tags, meta tag uses, common types of meta tag" /> </head>
You can see our content started by
and ending with tags. Meta must be between and tags. In our example it starts with title (title of the page), then meta description and then meta keywords.The Title Tag
Title is basic html tag but not a meta tag. Text that we place in the title tag (between the portions as shown in the example) will appear in the reverse bar of someone’s browser when they view the web page. For instance, within the title tag of this page that you are reading is this text:
Html Meta Tags with example
The title tag is also used as the words to describe your page when someone adds it to their “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” lists.
Title tag is very crucial when talks about search engine or page ranking. The text you use in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page.
The Meta Description Tag
The meta description tag impact on search engines page ranking system that support the tag.
In our example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says “name=description”, That’s the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the “content=” portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).
The Meta Keywords Tag
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for search engines to index along with meta description.
Meta keyword plays a important role where some search engine gives importance to keywords of meta tags. It also includes keywords that is not on that at all. The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself.
Meta Robots Tag
One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag. This lets you specify that a particular page should NOT be indexed by a search engine. To keep spiders out, simply add this text between your head tags on each page you don’t want indexed.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
We don’t need to use variations of the meta robots tag to help our pages get indexed. They are unnecessary. By default, any search engine will try to index all our web pages and will try to follow links from one page to another.
Most major search engines support the meta robots tag. However, the robots.txt convention of blocking indexing is more efficient, as you don’t need to add tags to each and every page.
This post was about some basic html meta tags. Hope it will help you to learn basics about meta tags.
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