What Are Meta Tags Used For? Need Possible HTML Meta Tag Tutorial Elements

This little tutorial is to explain what the <meta> tag is used in HTML on web pages. When i started working on HTML I always wondered what this tag was used for. Finally, I understand why they are important to have on all your webpages. As a webmaster, its important to make your websites search engine friendly.

There are two reasons to use meta tags:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Browser Behavior

- Search Engine Optimization -
The Meta tag is a very usefull tag for webmaster who want to customize their website listings on search engines. Meta tags can also help improve placement (or ranking) of your web pages in search egines like google. But not all search engines use meta tags, some very old search engines lack the technology or features to use meta tags, a good example is lycos.
So if you want to improve your website ranking, using meta tags, can be very useful and advantageous. so take advantages of this HTML tag.

- Browser Behavior -
Browser Meta Tags define particular things about a web page, for example, what character set to use when displaying the characters on the page, or what language the html document is written it, or how many long should be waited before refreshing the page or redirecting to another webpage. Here are some meat tags examples to use with different meta tags.

Setting the page's language
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">

Setting the page's character set
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Meta Refresh - Refreshing the page after 10 seconds
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="10">

Meta Redirect - Redirecting the page to hotmail.com after 10 seconds
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="10; URL=http://www.wallpaperama.com">

Meta Cache - Instruct the browser not to cache the page
<meta http-equiv="pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">

These are the main or most commonly used, there are also others. A meta element conveys hidden information about the document. Some browsers respond to this element to derive header information that may be important to the document but is not sent by the server in response to the request for the document. The element is also used to embed document information that some search engines use for indexing and categorizing documents on the World Wide Web. More than one meta element may be included in a document, and all meta elements belong nested inside the head element. The specific purpose of each meta element is defined by its attributes. Typically, a meta element reduces to a name/value pair that is of use to either the server or the client. For example, most browsers recognize attribute settings that force the page to reload (or redirect to another page) after a timed delay. This would be useful in a page whose content is updated minute-by-minute, because the browser keeps reloading the latest page as often as indicated in the meta element.

Several other elements and attributes in HTML 4 contain the same kind of metadata that might otherwise be located in meta elements. Use the avenue that is best suited to your intended server and browser environments. See also the address, del, ins, link, and title elements, as well as the profile attribute of the head element.

Much mythology surrounds meta element usage. Some attribute values affect only some browsers (controlling the browser cache, for example), and not all search engine bots respond to meta tag attribute values the same way (if at all). At the same time, commonly-used powers, such as refresh, are frowned upon by the standards. There are no mandated standards for acceptable values, but the W3C validators for HTML 4 and XHTML point toward acceptance of the character set value shown in the example below.

Example
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