There are a number of different Meta tags that you can use, but the most important ones are the Title and Description Meta tags.
Title
The title of your web page, which you want to make as descriptive as possible for the search engines to index. The most important meta-tag.
<title>Meta Tags Optimization Tutorial</title>
Description
This tag is used to give a short description of the contents of your web page, and is often used by search engines in the search results as a description of what your page contains. However, many search engines will only display the first characters, so be as short and descriptive as possible.
<meta name= “description” content=”Tutorial on Meta Tags optimization.”>
Keywords
Mostly used for internal optimization purposes, it doesn’t hurt to include the 3-6 keywords the page should be found for. A list of keywords, separated by commas, that some one might type into a search engine when looking for a site like yours. Most search engines will index the first 64 characters in this Meta tag.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta tags, tutorial, training, HTML”>
The rest of the tags are not necessary but you can use them for documentation purposes.
Rating
This is used to give the web page a rating for the appropriateness for kids. The ratings are, general, mature, restricted, and 14 years.
<meta name=”rating” content=”general”>
Author
This is used to identify the author of the web page.
<meta name=”author” content=”Bill Gates”>
Copyright
This one identifies any copyright information there is for the web page.
<meta name=”copyright” content=”2001, Acme Co.”>
Robots
This Meta tag is used is used to tell the search engine whether you want the web page indexed or not. You only really need to use this Meta tag if you DON’T wont your web page indexed. The values for this tag are:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>
| index(default) | Index the page |
| noindex | Don’t index the page |
| nofollow | Don’t index any pages hyper-linked to this page |
| none | Same as “noindex, nofollow” |
Meta Tags Example
Below is an example of the head of a document containing Meta tags for search engines and a title for the web page:
<title>Meta Tags For Search Engines</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Tutorial on Meta Tags optimization.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta tags, tutorial, training, HTML”>
<meta name=”rating” content=”general”>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”2001 Acme”>
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”31 Days”>
<meta name=”expires” content=”never”>
<meta name=”distribution” content=”global”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”index”>
</head>