Ken Ward's HTML Tutorial ...

Those Crucial Meta Tags!

This page deals with meta tags

as they help search engines classify pages, and

their use to re-direct pages

Why are Meta Tags so important?

When search engine spiders search the web, or you present your page to a search engine, it will probably read the meta tags in your document and the first part of your text to list your site and rank it according to keywords.

This is a basic page with Meta tags;

<html>

<head>

<title>

Dogs; Training, Grooming, and Feeding

</title>

<meta name="description" content="A page about training, grooming, feeding and taking care of dogs. " />

<meta name="keywords" content="Dogs,training,grooming dogs,dog nutrition,feeding dogs" />

</head>

<body>

<h1>

Training, Grooming, and Feeding Dogs

</h1>

In the first 200 words, use your keywords, so search engines that check the keywords find them in the text. This, after all, is what you would expect! If the keywords are about the page, then they will be in the page!

<hr />

</body>

</html>

The title of your page is important and should be a good keyword to the contents. Keep its length less than about 70 characters.

The description Meta tag should give a short accurate summary of the page;

This may be used by search engines to give the description of your page next to the URL.

The keywords Meta tag is very important. Do not repeat keywords more than 7 times, and do not continuously repeat them, otherwise, you may be blacklisted by the search engines!
<meta name="keywords" content="Dogs,training,grooming dogs,dog nutrition,feeding dogs" />

Using the Meta Tag to redirect pages.

Click this hyperlink to see the example page.

When you clicked the above link, the page should have returned to this one after 5 seconds. I think this is a neat trick to redirect pages!

Here's the code for the page;

<html>

<head>

<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="5; url=metaTags.htm#Back" />

<title>

Page to Return you to Meta Tags

</title>

</head>

<body>

This page will send you back to the Meta tags page after 5 seconds. If it doesn't,

<a href="metaTags.htm#Back">

click here.

</a>

</body>

</html>

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