The Meta tag in html is not a required tag when you're creating your web pages; many pages don't use the tag at all, and I must confess that I've not used it on my home page, although I put it into this page by way of demonstration. To put it briefly, the meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes.

If you simply produce your home page and register the URL with a search engine, or a number of search engines, their spider programs will eventually toddle along to your site to index it. Now, each of the search engines does this slightly differently. Altavista for example will grab everything in your document and index it, but will only show the first 250 characters in its description. Consequently, if your site included say, ?Thanks to:?.? right at the beginning, this is what Altavista would show in its description, and it wouldn't give the viewer any idea of what your site actually covered. Of course, not all search engines work this way; I'd suggest you ferret around a little bit to see exactly how the popular engines work, and certainly the major two or three such as Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and Excite. It therefore makes sense to ensure that your opening paragraph is carefully written to ensure it accurately reflects what your site covers. Meta Tags on your website's source page is the best Search Engine Optimization Tip that would help your site get up in rankings.

However, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. It is also important for you to know that not all search engines will use this tag - Altavista does, but Excite doesn't, for example. It's not a total cure-all therefore, but you won't miss out by putting the tag in, and it may well work well in some cases.

What can be included in a meta tag

There are basically four major meta tags that you can use:



The only resource type that is currently in use is ?document? This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but use of the others is a good idea.



Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. ?content? could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point. However, don't be so mean with your description that its not an appropriate reflection of the contents!



Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by commas. Remember to include synonyms, americanisms and so on. So, if you had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as car, cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.



Content should contain either global, local or iu (for Internal Use). To be perfectly honest, I can't quite get my head around this one; its supposed to list available resources designed to allow the use to find things easily, but I still don't quite get it. My advice is to stick to ?global?.

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