What is a meta tag?

Special HTML tags containing instructions for spiders or a user’s browser. Many tags are available, specifying everything from copyright information to page refresh dates. In search engine marketing and search engine optimization, the most widely used meta tags contain the description, keywords, redirection instructions and instructions for robots.

A meta tag basically tells a search engine spider how to view your website.  Too many characters, keywords, or key phrases or not enough can hurt your website. Proper meta tags should look like what is below:

<meta>

Can be used to specify additional metadata about a document, such as its author, publication date, expiration date, page description, keywords, or other information not provided through the other header elements and attributes. Because of their generic nature, meta elements specify associative key-value pairs.

In one form, meta elements can specify HTTP headers which should be sent by a web server before the actual content, for example:

<meta http-equiv="foo" content="bar">

— this specifies that the page should be served with an HTTP header called foo that has a value bar.

In the general form, a meta element specifies name and associated content attributes describing aspects of the HTML page. To prevent possible ambiguity, an optional third attribute, scheme, may be supplied to specify a semantic framework that defines the meaning of the key and its value: for example:

<meta name="foo" content="bar" scheme="DC">

In this example, the meta element identifies itself as containing the foo element, with a value of bar, from the DC.

Types of Meta Tags:

Meta Description Tag
Meta Keywords Tag
Meta Robots Tag Click the above links to see the different types of meta tags used and the proper way of using them.