Meta Tags

Meta tags are short records which you place in your HTML files to help search engines understand your page.

The most important meta tags for SEO purposes are:

• Description
• Keywords

The description meta tag is used by most search engines to identify the content of your page and by some search engines as a source for text to describe your page to the search engine user.

<meta name="Description" content="Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Internet Search Engines" />

The keywords meta tag is used by many search engines, but not Google, to identify the contents of your page.

<meta name="keywords" content="alt.internet.search-engines FAQ" />

Other common meta tags include:

• Title
• Author
• Owner
• Subject
• Rating
• Abstract
• Revisit-After
• Language
• Copyright
• Robots
• Expires
• Pragma

No search engines are known to index the data in these meta tags.

For an in-depth guide to HTML meta tags, read the HTML Tag Reference Guide: META.