A meta tag is a head element that records information about the current page, such as the character encoding, author, copyright, or keywords. These tags can also be used to give information to the server, such as the expiration date, refresh interval, and PICS rating for the page. (PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection, provides a method for assigning ratings, such as movie ratings, to Web pages.)

Attribute specifies whether the meta tag contains descriptive information about the page (name) or HTTP header information (http-equiv).

Value specifies the type of information you're supplying in this tag. Some values, such as description, keywords, and refresh, are already well defined (and have their own individual Property inspectors in Dreamweaver), but you can specify practically any value (for example, creation date, document ID, or level).

Content is the actual information.

The Head category contains buttons for adding various head elements, such as meta, keywords, and base tags. Back to top

Keyword Attribute
Chances are that if you manually code your Web pages, you’re aware of the "keyword" and "description" attributes. These allow the search engines to easily index your page using the keywords you specifically tell it, along with a description of the site that you yourself get to write. Couldn’t be simpler, right? You use the keywords attribute to tell the search engines which keywords to use, like this:
<META NAME ="keywords" CONTENT="life, universe, mankind, plants, relationships, the meaning of life, science">

You cannot spike the keywords by using the same word repeated over and over, most search engines have refined their spiders to ignore such tricks.

Description Attribute
Using the META description attribute, you add your own description for your page:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This page is about the meaning of life, the universe, mankind and plants."> Back to top

Make sure that you use several of your keywords in your description. While you are at it, you may want to include the same description enclosed in comment tags, just for the spiders that do not look at META tags. To do that, just use the regular comment tags, like this:
<!--// This page is about the meaning of life, the universe, mankind and plants. //--!>

Expires
This tells the browser the date and time when the document will be considered "expired." If a user is using Netscape Navigator, a request for a document whose time has "expired" will initiate a new network request for the document. An illegal Expires date such as "0" is interpreted by the browser as "immediately." Dates must be in the RFC850 format, (GMT format):
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 26 Feb 1997 08:21:57 GMT">
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Pragma
This is another way to control browser caching. To use this tag, the value must be "no-cache". When this is included in a document, it prevents Netscape Navigator from caching a page locally.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">

These two tags can be used as together as shown to keep your content current—but beware. Many users have reported that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer refuses the META tag instructions, and caches the files anyway. So far, nobody has been able to supply a fix to this "bug." As of the release of MSIE 4.01, this problem still existed.

Refresh
This tag specifies the time in seconds before the Web browser reloads the document automatically. Alternatively, it can specify a different URL for the browser to load.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.newurl.com">
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Be sure to remember to place quotation marks around the entire CONTENT attribute’s value, or the page will not reload at all.

Set-Cookie
This is one method of setting a "cookie" in the user’s Web browser. If you use an expiration date, the cookie is considered permanent and will be saved to disk (until it expires), otherwise it will be considered valid only for the current session and will be erased upon closing the Web browser.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Set-Cookie" CONTENT="cookievalue=xxx;expires=Wednesday, 21-Oct-98 16:14:21 GMT; path=/">
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Window-target
This one specifies the "named window" of the current page, and can be used to prevent a page from appearing inside another framed page. Usually this means that the Web browser will force the page to go the top frameset.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Window-target" CONTENT="_top">

ROBOTs
On the other hand, there are probably some of you who do not wish your pages to be indexed by the spiders at all. Worse yet, you may not have access to the robots.txt file. The robots META attribute was designed with this problem in mind.
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="all | none | index | noindex | follow | nofollow">

The default for the robot attribute is "all". This would allow all of the files to be indexed. "None" would tell the spider not to index any files, and not to follow the hyperlinks on the page to other pages. "Index" indicates that this page may be indexed by the spider, while "follow" would mean that the spider is free to follow the links from this page to other pages. The inverse is also true, thus this META tag:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT=" noindex">
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This would tell the spider not to index this page, but would allow it to follow subsidiary links and index those pages. "nofollow" would allow the page itself to be indexed, but the links could not be followed. As you can see, the robots attribute can be very useful for Web developers. For more information about the robot attribute, visit the W3C’s robot paper.

Placement of META tags
META tags should always be placed in the head of the HTML document between the actual <HEAD> tags, before the BODY tag. This is very important with framed pages, as a lot of developers tend to forget to include them on individual framed pages. Remember, if you only use META tags on the frameset pages, you'll be missing a large number of potential hits.

Automatically Generate META Tags!
Want to generate your META tags automatically? Click the link below then fill in the fields.
http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-metas.html
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