Meta Tags Tutorial part 1

What Are Meta Tags and Why Do I Want To Use Them?

There are ordinary tags, like <TABLE> and <P>, and there are meta tags. Meta is from the Greek and means more comprehensive or transcending. Many, many ordinary tags have been defined in the HTML specification, but the writers felt the need for a loophole tag, which they cleverly named META. All Meta tags must appear in the <HEAD> section of a web page.

There are 2 forms, although I'll concentrate on the latter. They are:

HTTP-EQUIV
this is the same as an HTTP header, which probably doesn't mean much to you unless you maintain a web server
NAME
this is what people usually mean when they refer to a Meta tag

HTTP-EQUIV tags are beyond the scope of this tutorial, and they are not recognized by all browsers. They allow the designer to manipulate the page in ways that are best done in the web server (HTTP server) itself. Depending on the browser, they may allow the page to automatically refresh, prevent it from being stored in the browser's cache, or prevent the page from appearing inside a frame. (If you need to do any of these things, I would suggest using JavaScript.)

NAME tags are used mainly to tell search robots how to index your page. This is how you supply the page's subject, description, and keywords, and the web author's name. Parts 3 and 4 of this tutorial describe these options.

Both forms of Meta tags use 2 keywords. The first is either HTTP-EQUIV or NAME, as described above, and the second is always CONTENT. Here is an example taken from an actual web page.

    On to HTTP-EQUIV >  
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