What are Meta Tags Used For?
HTML Meta tags are snippets of HTML code that are inserted in a web page’s header, and come after the title tag. The title tag itself is one of the essential components used in obtaining a high ranking in the SERPs. That’s because the words of the title tag are shown on the clickable links of the SERPs. So, making an adjustment with the wording can cause you to obtain more click-throughs. For SEO purposes, meta tags are labeled as meta keyword tags and meta descriptions tags. These tags are invisible to the user and are used to supply data or directions to the search engines in order to access information.
So, in essence, a meta tag is a statement used for HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that defines some of the content on a web page. The meta tag is necessary in order to index the page so people needing access to the information provided on the web page can easily locate it. While there are a variety of meta tags used, when it comes to indexing, the meta tags for the description and keywords are the most important – all essential information for describing a page’s contents. Usually, the description meta tag is comprised of a short review of one or two sentences about a page’s content. By using good meta tags then, you can increase your page’s popularity in the SERPs.
<title>Search Engine Optimization</title>
<meta name="description" content="Free Web tutorials" />
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript" />
<meta name="author" content="Hege Refsnes" />
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
</head>
Examples
Example 1 - Define keywords for search engines:
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, CSS, XML, XHTML, JavaScript" />
Example 2 - Define a description of your web page:
<meta name="description" content="Free Web tutorials on HTML and CSS" />
Example 3 - Define the last revision of your page:
<meta name="revised" content="Hege Refsnes, 23/10/2011" />
Example 4 - Refresh document every 30 seconds:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30" />
