Meta tags are short records which you place in your HTML files to help search engines understand your page.
The most important meta tags for SEO purposes are:
- Description
- Keywords
The description meta tag is used by most search engines to identify the content of your page and by some search engines as a source for text to describe your page to the search engine user.
<meta name=”Description” content=”Answers to Frequently Asked Questions” />
The keywords meta tag is used by many search engines, but not Google, to identify the contents of your page.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”alt.internet.search-engines FAQ” />
Other common meta tags include:
- Title
- Author
- Owner
- Subject
- Rating
- Abstract
- Revisit-After
- Language
- Copyright
- Robots
- Expires
- Pragma
No search engines are known to index the data in these meta tags.
For an in-depth guide to HTML meta tags, read the HTML Tag Reference Guide: META.
