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Over the years, Meta tags have become quite misunderstood and are often used incorrectly on the Internet. Done correctly, Meta tags can be a valuable onsite optimization tool and can have a positive effect of conversion rates.
META Tags or what are officially referred to as Meta data Elements, are found within the <head></head> section of your web pages or Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. They take a variety of forms and serve a variety of purposes, but in the context of search engine optimization when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag. The meta tag has three possible attributes content,http-equiv, and name.
Meta tags always provide information in a name/value pair. The name and http-equiv attributes provide the name information and the content provides the value information. Meta tags do not have a closing tag.
content: This attribute will always be found in a well formed meta tag. It provides the value information in the name/value pair. It can be any valid string, which you should enclose in quotes.
Name: This is the name portion in the name value pair. You can use any name that you would like or that might be useful to you. Some common names are: - keywords - words that identify what the page is about, usually used in search engines
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, HTML help, meta tags, promotion, web sites">
- description - a short description of the page
<meta name="description" content="Boost your marketing strategy with meta tags">
- author - the author's name and possibly email address
<meta name="author" content="Jennifer Kyrnin">
- robots - to allow or disallow indexing by robots
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
- copyright - the copyright date of the page
<meta name="copyright" content="August 1999">
http-equiv: This attribute is also a name for the name/value pair, but it is used by the server to include that name/value pair in the MIME document header passed to the Web browser before sending the actual HTML document. Some common http-equiv types are:
- charset - defines the character set used in the page
<meta http-equiv="charset" content="iso-8859-1">
- expires - when the document will be out of date
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="31 Dec 99">
- refresh - sets the number of seconds to reload the page or reload to a new page
Reload the page every 10 seconds:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10">
Reload to a new page after 10 seconds:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=http://webdesign.about.com/"> |
On-Page Optimization
