Meta Tags
What are meta tags?
Meta tags are short pieces of code you can include in the head section of a page to provide more information about it. This is of particular use for search engines, which will look at the meta tags when indexing your site.How to use meta tags
Meta tags can be of two different formats;<meta name="name" content="content">
<meta http-equiv="name" content="content">
<meta http-equiv="name" content="content">
To use them simply write them in the <head> section of your page, taking care to use name or http-equiv appropriately.
Description
<meta name="description" content="content">
content - A small paragraph describing your website. This may be used by search engines when they display your site as a search result, and so you should write something that will catch people's attention and let them know that your site is the one they were searching for.
Keywords
<meta name="keywords" content="content">
content - A list of words, separated by commas, that describe your website. These were once used heavily by search engines but they have become less important as they turned out to be an easy way to cheat the search engine system.
Robots
<meta http-equiv="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
noindex - Tell robots (search engines) which are looking at your site not to add it to their index.
nofollow - Tell robots which are looking at your site not to follow any links they find. (Either can be omitted.)
Author
<meta name="author" content="content">
content - Your name.
No Cache
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="nocache">
nocache - Tells a browser not to save a copy of your website locally. This is usually done so that the information does not have to be fetched from the server hosting the website every time it is viewed, so your pages may load more slowly for viewers if you include this meta tag. The benefit would be that if you make changes to your site often, your visitors will always see the latest pages, as opposed to a cached version.
Refresh
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="delay;url=new-url">
delay - The number of seconds to wait before redirecting to the new URL.
new-url - The URL of the page you want to redirect visitors to, from the current one. If this is the address of the current page, it will continually refresh itself.