The META tag can be used for many things. It’s used for giving info on a website, or for autmatically refreshing pages. All the META tags go between the HEAD statements, before or after the TITLE tags. There are several common META tags used, as outlined below:
<META http-equiv=”refresh” content=”#; url=http://www.zzz.com”>
# is the number of seconds to wait before it auto refreshes. It tells the browser to go to http://www.htmlcenter.com in that # of seconds. So if you had content=”4; url=”http://www.blah.com”
then the page it’s on would take four seconds to reload to www.blah.com.
<META name=”keywords” content=”keyword keyword2 keyword3″>
This tag tells search engines what keywords are present in your page, instead of just looking at the title of your page. Only a few engines support this tag, such as Altavista and Excite. Also, some of these engines have blockers that if you include too many of the same keywords it will disregard your page. content=”html meta center tutorials”
is an example of keywords that this page might use.
<META name=”description” content=”Enter a description here”>
This tag is used by search engines for their results pages. Without a proper meta description the search engine will generally pick up the first bit of content from the page. This might not be desirable because the first bit of content might be a menu or other navigation.
<META name=”generator” content=”The generator”>
This tag is outdated. Software applications use this to show the source code viewer what application was used to create the page.
<META name=”author” content=”author’s name”>
Display’s site authors name. Very rarely used today.