Discover The Power of Meta Tags

Written by Larry Lang, added 14/8/2007  

Meta tags are lines of code and are located in the “head” section of your web page. These lines of code, even though they are not displayed by your browser, are very useful when providing additional descriptive information about your web page. There are a number of different Meta tags used in your web pages, some more important than others.

Meta tags, or a element (both are the same), must contain what is called an attribute, and have some kind of value following it. A required attribute is content, and it defines the Meta information that goes with the attributes, http-equiv and name.

The http-equiv attribute has values like “content-type, expires, refresh, and set-cookie.” One example of an http-equiv attribute is if you have moved your web page to a new URL. You want to let your customers know the page has moved and, after a predetermined time, they will be automatically redirected to the new URL.

Example:

In the above example, your web page will refresh causing your user’s browser to refresh the current URL. Displayed is the short message you have placed on this page notifying your users the current page has moved and they will be redirected to the new page. In the above example, after 5 seconds the user will automatically be redirected to the new web page at http://www.yournewpage.com.

The name attribute has values such as, “author, description, keywords, generator, revised”, to name a few, and is the one most commonly used. For example, this attribute is the one you use when creating the description for your web page,

In the above example, we used the name attribute, and its value is description. We also used the required attribute, content. The content attribute defines what the Meta information is that goes with the value, description.



The description Meta tag, as it is more commonly referred to, is very important. This is what is displayed on the results page of search engines, and is located underneath your title tag. The title tag should contain as many of your keywords, or keyword phrases, as possible in a short, coherent sentence describing your web page.

The Meta tag that most people have heard of is keyword Meta tag. Although it is not as important as it once was, it is still a good idea to include it on your web pages. You should only put keywords in here that you are using on your web page, so they should be really focused. I suggest using between three to five keywords or keyword phrases, each being separated by a comma. Below is an example:

In all of the above examples, notice the Meta tag is, what they call, “properly closed”. It is considered “properly closed” when using a space after the last quote, followed by />. By closing all of your Meta tags this way, they will be W3C compliant. Also, when you check your code, you will not show any errors.

Creating the code for Meta tags is easy when you use our Meta Tag Generator, found at Elite Web Coaching. All you need to do to create your Meta tag code is fill in the form, press the submit button, then copy and paste your new code into your website. It is as simple as that!

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