HTML Tutorial
    Introduction
    What is HTML?
    HTML Basics
    Coding Basics
    Text
    Links
    Images
    Layout Basics
    Tables
    Meta Tags
    Color Codes
    Symbol Codes
JavaScripts
Javascript Tutorial
    Meta tags don't effect the way your webpage is viewed at all. Their purpose is to describe your webpage in some way. They are often used by search engines when indexing your page. Using meta tags often helps your webpage get ranked higher in the results from search engines.

    Meta tags are slightly different then most other HTML tags. For one thing, they go in the header of the document instead of the body. If you recall from the beginning of this tutorial, the title tag also goes in the header. The meta tag is also different because it has no closing tag. See below for examples of some possible meta tags:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="HTML, tutorial">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT = "This is an HTML tutorial">
<META NAME="author" CONTENT = "protoplasm">

    Different search engines look at different meta tag names so there is no list of all possible names but these examples are commonly excepted standards.

    In addition to describing the content of your webpage, you can also use meta tags to set certain attributes about your webpage. For example if you want your page to refresh every few minutes or expire after a certain amount of time. The following example refreshes the page every 60 seconds.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="60">

Other possible values for http-equiv are 'content-type', 'expires', and 'set-cookie'.

Written by Protoplasm

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