META tags are not markup tags. Unlike a TABLE tag, or an IMG tag, the browser may never reveals the contents of a META tag directly to the user. Instead, META tags describe the page itself. They may indicate what kind of software produced the page or when the page was last updated.META tags are not markup tags. Unlike a TABLE tag, or an IMG tag, the browser may never reveals the contents of a META tag directly to the user. Instead, META tags describe the page itself. They may indicate what kind of software produced the page or when the page was last updated.
META tags can say a lot about your document, but for now, I want to focus on three important META tags. There’s only one thing you need to know first: META tags are placed in the head of a document, that is between the opening <HEAD> and closing </HEAD> tags.
The Refresh META Tag
The Refresh META tag tells the browser to wait a certain amount of time, then open up the specified page. It is called a refresh tag because it is often used to reload the same page after a certain amount of time. The New York Times, for example, instructs browsers to refresh their homepage every 900 seconds so that the reader sees frequent updates with breaking news.
The Times tag looks like this
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” CONTENT=”900″>
The content attribute contains the number of seconds to wait before executing the refresh. We can also specify what URL to use. This is an excellent way to redirect a request, such as when a homepage has moved to another address. We do this by placing a semi-colon after the time delay, then URL and the address we want to load after the timeout.
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” CONTENT=”10;URL=http://foo.bar”>
The Description META Tag
This tag gives a short concise summary of what the contents of the page are. For example, a description META tag for this page might be:
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Introduction to three important META tags for HTML authors.”>
The NAME attribute is set to “description” and then the CONTENT value
describes the page. Simple, huh?
The Keywords META Tag
This tag is similar to the Description tag above, but it gives a list of terms relevant to the page rather than a gramatically correct summary. As an example, a relevant Keywords META tag for this page is:
<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”introduction, META tags, HTML, tutorial, refresh tag, keywords tag, description tag”>
The Keywords tag, in combination with the Description tag, is used by many search engines as a way of determining what your page is about. But many people don’t use them. I did a recent check on two medium size listings of adult websites (around 500 links each) to see how many sites on the lists were using these tags. More than one third of the sites failed to use these tags, and therefore missed out on a chance to tell search engines what their page was all about.
One word of warning: companies (most notably Playboy) have succesfully sued websites that used their trademarks in keywords META tags. Better to use a generic term like “photocopy” than a trademarked name like “xerox”.
For technical details on all the available META tags, check out
the Vancouver webpages – http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/ , or try searching for
META tags at Yahoo.
