Meta Tags

What are Meta Tags?

Meta tags store information about Web pages. They tell browsers and search engines things like the page title, what language the page is written in, a description of the content, who owns the copyright, the content rating, and what type of W3C document it is.

Where Are They?

Meta data is stored in the "head" of every Web page. You can view the meta tags of any page by clicking View > Source (or View > Page Source).

Who Cares?

A well written page title and description can make all the difference in your search engine results. More than 30% of all search engines require meta tags for your site to be listed at all (note that most search engines ignore the keyword meta data because of spam abuse).

Tag List

Content-Type

Usually set as text/html and iso-8859-1. It just tells the browser what type of content it is.

Title

This is what goes in the "Title Bar" at the top of the browser.

Description

A brief description of the individual page (not the whole website ). Use 64-256 characters.

Keywords

Words that your users would type to find your pages. Use less than 256 characters.

Copyright

Protect your information by providing your copyright information in this tag and somewhere visible on every page. US copyright guidelines find this format acceptable: Copr. © 2005 NorthView Builders.

Robots

This tells search engine bots which pages to spider. You may see this listed in a document's head, but Google suggests using the robots.txt instead.

Other Tags

There are many other existing, proposed and specialized tags, like Revisit-After, DC tags, Classification, and Distribution but the most common ones are listed above.