This tutorial covers the concept of meta tags and meta information that can be embedded in the HTML code of web pages so search engines can better index and categorize your pages.
A properly formatted HTML document (web page) is divided into two major sections, the head and the body. The body is where everything you want displayed in the browser is found. The head is where meta tags and other “behind the scenes” information is placed. If you use a WYSIWYG web editor like FrontPage or NVU you usually never see the head portion of the page but there are usually ways to enter data about that page that the editor will add as meta tags..
There are three main META tags, the TITLE, description and keywords. The “head” section of a web page should look similar to this.
<head>
<title> Web Page Title</title>
<meta name=”author” content=” John Smith“>
<meta name=”description” content=” This is the description of the page or the information on it.“>
<meta name=”keywords” content=” subject, descriptor, subject 2, etc…”>
</head>
The title is the name of the page you want displayed in the top frame of the browser when it is opened as well as the default text entered when the page is book marked. Search engines will also you the title for indexing purposes.
The meta author is the name of the person who wrote or created the page. If a group effort list the team ID.
The meta description is a brief explanation of the page and what it is for.
The meta keywords are words that are related to the subject of the page. They should be words that when entered into a search engine will bring up your page.
There are a couple other meta tags which are more for browsers like the language and character set used on the page. They are an advanced topic beyond the scope of this tutorial.
Meta tags are not 100% effective but can help search engines properly index your page and raise your hit count, i.e. popularity.
As an exercise you can “right click” on this page and view the source to see the meta tags it uses.
