HTML Meta Tags
HTML meta tags are used to give detailed instructions in regard to a web page to the Search Engines and browsers.
Meta tags are very easy to add to your web pages, as they all begin with “Meta,” have no closing tag and are placed between the <head> and </head> tags.
There are two types of META tags:
Meta http-equiv – Are the equivalent of HTTP headers. They are used to direct the actions of a Web browser.
Meta Name – Are META tags with a name attribute. This type of Meta tag does not conform to normal HTTP headers.
When you use a meta tag, you specify the attribute and the value.
Here are some of the more popular Meta tags:
Author
<meta name="author" content="Webpage Author" />
Refers to the author of the web page.
Generator
<meta name="generator" content="HTML Editing Program" />
Specifies the name of the HTML editing program used to create the web page.
Description
<meta name="description" content="Description of the web page content" />
Keywords
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords" />
Refresh
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="4; URL=http://www.yourdomain.com" />
The CONTENT attribute tells the browser to redirect the visitor to the URL you specify in 4 seconds. This can be changed to whatever you’d like.
Pragma
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />
When visiting a website, your browser will cache or make a copy of the webpage for faster viewing your next visit. This will prevent return visitors from seeing new content unless they manually reload their browser. This Meta tag tells the browser not to cache this particular page.
Robots NoFollow
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
This tag tells the robots not to index this page and not to follow any links within the page, which is good for pages, such as product download pages.
Robots Follow
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
This tag tells the robots not to index this page, but follow any links within the page.
This concludes the HTML meta tags tutorial. In the next section, we will focus on HTML comments.