With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none and in September 2009 Matt Cutts of Google announced that they were no longer taking keywords into account whatsoever. It is speculated that it does if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any effect on ranking at any of the major search engines today. The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. Under such circumstances, a definitive understanding of the role of meta tags in SEO is unlikely. Google have stated they update their ranking rules every 48 hours. Furthermore, most search engines change their ranking rules frequently. Major search engine robots look at many factors when determining how to rank a page of which meta tags will only form a portion. Google states they do support the meta tags 'content', 'robots', 'google', 'google-site-verification', 'content-type', 'refresh' and 'google-bot'. Some claim they have no value, others that they are central, while many simply conclude there is no clear answer but, since they do no harm, they use them just in case. The search engine community is now divided as to the value of meta tags.

Prior to the rise of content-analysis by search engines in the mid-1990s (most notably Google), search engines were reliant on metadata to correctly classify a Web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element. They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO), where different methods are used to provide a user's website with a higher ranking on search engines. Meta elements provide information about the web page, which can be used by search engines to help categorize the page correctly. Meta element used in search engine optimization In this example, the meta element describes the contents of a web page. Meta elements can specify HTTP headers which should be sent before the actual content when the HTML page is served from the web server to the client. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. charset is used to indicate the character set of the document, and is available in HTML5. The value of the statement, in either case, is contained in the content attribute, which is the only required attribute unless charset is given. http-equiv is used to emulate an HTTP header, and name to embed metadata. Under HTML 5, charset has been added and scheme has been removed. With HTML up to and including HTML 4.01 and XHTML, there were four valid attributes: content, http-equiv, name and scheme.

The meta element has two uses: either to emulate the use of an HTTP response header field, or to embed additional metadata within the HTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.

Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. They are part of a web page's head section. To learn where to put the meta tags, please check the next article on Adding a Meta Description Tag.Meta elements are tags used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page. To place meta tags in your site you will need to edit the code. Refresh or redirect the user to another pageīelow will refresh the same page after 45 seconds.īelow will redirect you to Google after 5 seconds. This meta data supplies the author information. Must contain a small Sentence/Paragraph about your site. The Description meta tag is what Google uses to display in their search engine. Adds a description page for search engines This allows single words separated by commas to list what the article is focusing on. How meta tags are used? List keywords for search enginesīelow is an example of the keyword meta tag. Below is a brief description of what the Meta tag code looks like. Meta tags are all stored in the section of your website code. Shows last modified and authorship information.Stores Descriptions and Keywords for search engines.This information is not seen by the visitor of the site. What is a Meta tag?Ī Meta tag is an HTML tag that is specifically for the browser to read information about the site. This article will explain what meta tags are for. Managing your pages meta tag information is important for when search engines like Google search your site.

This is commonly associated with “ SEO” (Search Engine Optimization). When working on a website, you may hear references to “ Meta Data” or “ Meta Tags“.

Meta tag data