HTML Meta Tags – What are they and how do you use them on your website?
Thursday, July 13th, 2006What are they and how do you use them on your website?
By Dylan Downhill
Originally authored: 10 May 2004
Update: 13 July 2006
Below is a collection of the most useful tags found in a document <HEAD> section. It was inspired by an article I read that mentioned some of these tags but didn’t say why you included them, what they did and what options were available for the tag.
As background, meta tags were originally included to aid early search engines to summarize and categorize web pages correctly. Unfortunately everyone figured out that by optimizing their meta tags they could receive better rankings. As more sites started using over-optimized (spammed) meta tags, their usefulness for categorizing web pages diminished and most of the major search engines now treat them with little importance in their rankings.
This might seem the death of meta tags, however they have been extended and expanded through HTML 4.0 and still serve a purpose, though most are not for ranking in the SERPs.
TITLE Tag
This tag tells the search engines what your page is all about. It is probably the most important tag in the <head> section of your document. This field is often displayed in search engines results so should provide a good overview of the page (and of course have your main keyword in it).
<TITLE>Red Widgets for Sale</TITLE>
HTTP-EQUIV Tags
META tags with an HTTP-EQUIV attribute are equivalent to HTTP headers. Typically, they control the action of browsers, and may be used to refine the information provided by the actual headers. Tags using this form should have an equivalent effect when specified as an HTTP header, and in some servers may be translated to actual HTTP headers automatically or by a pre-processing tool.
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html;charset=iso-8859-1″>
This describes the language and format the document is in. Type indicates the type of content within the document (i.e. HTML, XML, etc). The charset indicates the character set. This meta tag is meant to override the content type preconfigured in both the server and the browser, however this does not always work as expected.
<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”0″>
The date and time after which the document should be considered expired. The date field should read ‘Mon, 10 Apr 2004 14:32:39 GMT”. An invalid value (such as ‘0′) will be taken as meaning expire immediately and is useful to stop a browser caching a document.
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Style-Type” content=”text/css”>
Specifies the default style sheet language for a document.
NAME Tags
Intended for the search engines to read and index, the following tags should always be included
<meta name=”distribution” content=”global”>
Ensure any page you want seen by the searching public is global.
| Value | Description |
| Global | Appropriate for web access. |
| Local | Web servers will not service a “local” document to the web. |
| IU | Internal use – Intranets. |
<meta name=”author” content=”name”>
Who owns the site, or who designed the site. Set “name” to the name of the author of the document. Separate multiple authors with commas.
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright 2004 www.ElixirSystems.com”>
Copyright information.
<meta name=”description” content=”text”>
Include your description of the site or page in the “text” field. To maximize your search engine ranking, be sure to use keywords within your description, but do not overstuff.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords, another keyword, 2->4 keywords “>
For more information on keywords see the articles in March and April 2004.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow, noodp “>
Tell the search engine robot to index and follow your document, this doesn’t mean that it will, it just gives the spiders permission.
| Value | Description |
| follow | Follow all links on the page (default) |
| nofollow | Use this for pages which you want indexed, but you don’t want the linked to pages indexed. |
| index | Index this page (default) |
| noindex | Do not index this page. |
| noodp | Do not show the DMOZ.org title for this page. See notes below. |
One source the search engines use to generate titles and descriptions they show in the search engine results is DMOZ – the Open Directory Project, or ODP. Sometimes this results in less than enticing results being displayed. By adding the ‘noodp’ robots tag to the top of your files the search engines that support this tag will not use the DMOZ title and descriptions.
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”30 days”>
This tag is not used by any search engine and should be avoided. Most of the major search engine spiders will index a page depending on the frequency of update – if you want a page indexed more often then update it more often.
<meta name=”rating” content=”text”>
Use “text” to indicate the rating of the site.
| Value | Description |
| 14 Years | PG-13 |
| General | PG |
| Mature | R rated |
| Restricted | X rated |
| Safe For Kids | G |
Useful Template
To save you cutting and pasting the above individually, below is everything together with the most useful options set and in their suggested order:
<title>Red Widgets for Sale</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Description”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords”>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Style-Type” content=”text/css”>
<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”30 days”>
<meta name=”author” content=”Dylan Downhill”>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright 2006 www.elixirsystems.com”>
<meta name=”distribution” content=”global”>
<meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>Introduction to the most common HTML meta tags, their uses and their common attributes. Extended to include the new noodp tag.