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 Meta tags are HTML tags which provide specific information to servers, search engines and web browsers. This information is not seen by the end user. Meta data can provide all sorts of information. Some search engines ignore the data provided in META tags, while others make use of the description and keywords. You can also use META tags to specify how your page should be cached, to take advantage of the PICS content rating system operated by ICRA , and to get an HTML page to automatically jump to another page or file after a specified time delay. META tags go between the <HEAD> </HEAD> area of a web page.
KEYWORD <meta name="keywords" content="Fishing, Tackle, Lures, Outdoors, Trout, Salmon, Marlin"> Gives search engines "key words" by which to identify the content of a website. Therefore, if someone came to the search engine and typed 'Fishing' or 'Trout' into the search box, a homepage related to fishing would come up under the search results, (at least in theory). DESCRIPTION <meta name="description" content="The best place to find everything to do with fishing, bait, lures & the best places to catch fish."> Search engines usually summarize a website by using the first 200 words or so on a webpage. This tag can be used to give the search engines a more detailed and accurate summary of your site. EXPIRES <meta http-equiv="expires" content="Fri, 11 Apr 2009 17:46:01 GMT"> Tells the browser to reload the page once the expiry date has been reached. Setting a date that has already passed should force the browser to load the latest version of your page. This is helpful for making sure that anyone who has their browser cached (such as AOL users) will get the newest version of your website, even if they've visited it before. REFRESH <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10; url=newpage.htm"> This tells the browser to refresh the current page or go to a new URL after a specified period of time, which is set in the 'content' portion of the tag. If you remove the 'url' section from the above tag, the current page will reload after 10 seconds. Specifying a URL tells the browser where to go after the time limit has been reached. You can create a kind of "poor man's animation", (and this has been done extensively on the web) by telling each new page arrived at to go to yet another page, and ad infinitum. Word of advice - don't do it on your homepage. It's cool the first time around...but it gets old fast. You can also 'jump' your viewers to a new URL using JavaScript. Here's the code:
<html> The link in the above code is for the benefit of browsers that don't support JavaScript. AUTOSOUND <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0"; url="/audio/bdrs.wav"> You can automatically trigger a sound file to play when a page is loaded. By setting the 'content' portion of the tag to a specified amount of seconds (such as 10), you can specify how long of a delay there will be for the file to be downloaded. This will allow your viewers to start browsing your text before having to wait until the download of the sound file is complete. FURTHER RESEARCH: |
