What is Meta Tag?

This post is as continue post from previous and also I got from Cosaaranda site. Beside the Geo Tags, there are also tags named — Meta Tags. Like geo tag, Meta tags are additional information regarding our sites or site's page which are added in header area of the HTML code of the site. So let us continue to know these Meta tags.

Meta Tag Description

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This is book site">

From above example, it can be seen that Meta tag description is consist of information about web or webpage description. Idealy, meta tag consist of not more than 180 characters including space or 25 words.

Meta Tag Keywords

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="new book,author,writer,publisher,best seller book">

Meta tag keywords consist of key words that related to theme of the web or webpage. The keywords can be simple word or phrase. Ideally it more than 10 key words.

Meta Tag Robots

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">

Meta tag robots consist of instruction for robot or crawler of the search engine (e.g. Yahoo, Google, etc). At above example, the crawler of search engine is allowed to index the related page and follow all links on the web page. Currently this Meta tag already rare to be used by web developers because there is other solution that more flexible to control the robot of the search engine. This option is to use file robots.txt.

Meta Tag Refresh

<META NAME="refresh" CONTENT="5″>

Meta tag refresh is used to give instruction for the browser to refresh or to reload the related web or webpage in certain frequency. In above example the web or webpage will be refreshed or reloaded every 60 seconds.

<META NAME="refresh" CONTENT="5;URL=http://other-domain.com">

Other use of Meta tag refresh is to redirect the visitors to others web or webpage after certain duration. In example above the visitors will be redirect to web otherdomain.com after 5 seconds.

The use of Meta tag refresh sometimes is also combined with Meta http-equiv. As follow:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">

In the Meta http-equiv pragma above, the Meta tag instruct to the browser not to cache or save the copy of webpage in the browser history so when the visitors open the webpage the browser need to reload the webpage from the server every time the visitor open the web page.

Besides those 4 Meta Tags, actually there are more Meta Tags. I hope this will give you knowledge.