Meta Tags

Web page Information and Control Meta tags

META tags have two possible forms:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="name" CONTENT="content">
or
<META NAME="name" CONTENT="content">

All of the search engine tags above use the Meta Name tags.

HTTP-EQUIV tags

META tags with an HTTP-EQUIV attribute are equivalent to HTTP headers (control information sent by the web server to the web browser. They are used to control the action of browsers and may augment/refine the information provided by the actual headers themselves.

Commonly used HTTP-EQUIV tags are:

Content-Language

Species he language used e.g.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="en-GB">

Expires

Used to tell browsers and any caching servers how long to keep the content.

<META http-equiv="Expires" content="mon, Oct 2005 12:12:10 GMT"> Content expires on this date.

<META http-equiv="Expires" content="0">     Causes browser always to read the content and not to cache it.

Note: not such a  commonly used tag

Refresh

This is commonly used to automically redirect a user to another page.

Content = number of seconds and URL= url of new web page ( either relative or absolute) e.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="3;URL=new.html"> or

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="3;URL=http://www.xyz.com/new.html">

Content Type

Specifies the media type and character set of an HTML document and should be included on each page.

The Nvu editor generate this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=""ISO-8859-1">

  FrontPage produces this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">

Copyright

<META NAME="COPYRIGHT" CONTENT="&copy; 2005 steve">

Doctype:

This tag provides information ( Usually to html validator programs) about the HTML/XHTML on the web page and  is optional in html but is mandatory for xhtml (xhtml). The Doctype is used by validation programs when checking your html for valid code. (see validating web pages).

 The doctype should be the very first line of your document and comes even before the HTML Tag. It should be the only thing on that line.

Note: It is case sensitive

Example:

This declaration is missing on most of the web pages currently on the Internet. However it is a good idea to start including it now. There are three levels of compliance- strict, loose and frameset this is specified by the document type definition (DTD) in the above example it is loose.

You will often see this specified without the DTD entry simply as-

 See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html for more details on other DTD types.

Note: If your web pages are currently missing this declaration I would not go back and include it on the old web pages but start including it on the newer ones. This is because it can cause display problems in some browsers.

Editing Meta Tags