Chapter 12: Using Meta
Tags
Improving Search Engine Results...
When a search engine finds your page, it will need to index it
(that is, add it to its searchable database) with some
information off the page. Many search engines now support the <META> tags, which
allow you to give keywords and a description to your page. This
gives you more control over how your page will show up during a
search, and will often cause more traffic to your page.
The <META> tag
can be used for a few different purposes. Usually, you should
place the <META> tag
within the <head>
tags at the beginning of your document. To improve search engine
results, we will use two specific attributes within the meta tag.
Here is an example:
<meta name="description"
content="description of page goes here">
<meta name="keywords"
content="keywords go here">
When a user searches a search engine that supports meta tags and
they query a phrase (search for a keyword) related to your page,
your page may show up in the list of results. Your page will be
listed by its Title, and then underneath its title will be the
first hundred or so characters of the description you placed in
the meta tag. It is recommended that you keep the description
content to no more than 200 characters. Although the keywords
content is not seen by the user when searched, it is recommended
to keep this less than 1000 characters, because if you have more
the search engine will either ignore the rest or delete you from
the index. (Spaces are not needed to separate keywords)
Example of a real-life meta situation...
<html>
<head>
<title>Little Joe's Sound Page</title>
<meta name="description" content="Joe's
Collection of Cool Sound files for you to use in your home
page!">
<meta name="keywords" content="music sounds
midi wav joe collection">
</head>
<body>
Page Goes Here
</body>
</html>
Meta tags are not visible in the web page unless the user selects
to 'view source'.
Auto-refreshing...
Automatic Refreshing is supported by many newer versions of
Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. This also
uses a modified form of the <META>
tag. Auto refreshing means that once one page loads, you can set
a certain number of seconds and then the browser will load
another page automatically. The basic structure is as follows:
<meta http-equiv=REFRESH
CONTENT=x_seconds;url="http://www.yourhost.com/pagetosendto.html">
The URL is the page you want it to refresh to, CONTENT
is the number of seconds you want it to wait before refreshing,
and http-equiv=REFRESH just tells it that this is
the refresh meta tag. For example, if you wanted the page to
refresh to AD-Line.com after 5 seconds it would be as follows:
<meta http-equiv=REFRESH
CONTENT=5;URL="http://www.ad-line.com/">