If you examine the HTML coding of a web page, the Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted o the header of a web page, between the “opening” and “closing” HEAD tags. Meta tags give information about your Web page to search engine robots so the search engine can better recognize what your site is about. Meta tags provide this information in a format that the web crawlers/spiders that visit your web site can understand.

Meta tags were the original way to notify search engines what your web page was about. Meta tags list data about the web page, for instance the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core data. Lastly, Meta tags aren’t visible within the web page unless the user selects to ‘view source’.

Several types of Meta Tags

The Description Meta Tag: should contain a coherent description of the page, and should contain words that are located within the page content.

The Copyright Meta Tag: is utilized to indicate that your information is copy righted.

The Author Meta Tag: is used to insert a name of the webmaster or company.

The Language Meta Tag: is utilized by regional search engines.

The Charset Meta Tag: is utilised to notify the browser which character set to make use of.

The Distribution Meta Tag: is utilized to tell search engines whether the page is global or locally oriented.

The Rating Meta Tag: is employed to set an audience content rating.

The Robots Meta Tag: is used to tell search engines whether to index and/or crawl a page or not.

The Revisit Meta Tag: is used to tell search engines when to come back next and index your site again. It has been stated that the Meta Revisit After tag will boost your site’s rankings with search engines that credit fresh pages. Search engines, however, will not obey the Meta Revisit After tag and will come back to index your site on their own schedule, not when you tell them to.

The Expires Meta Tag: is used to notify search engines when when the page and content is no longer valid.

The Meta Refresh tag: is utilized to specify a delay in seconds before the browser automatically reloads the document or URL specified. It is recommended not to make use of the Meta Refresh tag as search engines can detect the use of the Meta Refresh tag and they consider it suspicious due to the tag being exploited by spam or virus web pages.

Learn more about Meta Tags by visiting Advantage SEO. Information covering search engine optimization, PPC advertising, web design, usability issues and social media marketing.