Meta Tags
| Finally, you get to do something with the <head> tag. So far, you've only seen the <title> tag used to give information about the document, but you can do a lot more with the <head> tag. What's more, aside from the <title> tag, information in the <head> tag doesn't usually appear in your document. You can use the meta information tag (<meta>) to identify the page's author, keywords used for searching, or a brief description to appear in search results. You also can use the <meta> tag to give commands to the browser. You can use as many <meta> tags as you like in your page. You'll learn how in the sections that follow. Improved SearchingSearch engines (as you'll find in Lesson 17, "Planning for the Future") add the content of your Web pages to their indexes. When a potential visitor enters a search phrase, the search engine checks its index to find that word and returns any pages that include that word. It works great. But, what if you were a realtor and you worked hard at creating a Web page that included the words houses, housing, sale, and buy; but didn't include the phrase real estate? If that was the phrase your visitor was looking for, they would never find your page.You can use the <meta> tag to include product names, geographic locations, industry terms, and synonyms that people might be searching for. There are three <meta> tags that work to help improve your chances of being found by a search engine:
Meta information for search engines comes in pairs: name and contents. The following HTML code includes meta information pairs for each of the preceding <meta> tags. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1- transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <title>Your HTML Page</title> <meta name="keywords" contents="words that people might use to search for your page." /> <meta name="description" contents="a brief paragraph describing your document." /> <meta name="author" contents="your name" /> </head> <body> <p>Insert your text here.</p> </body> </html> Caution
Refresh and RedirectThere might be times when you want to replace one page with another or want to redirect a link. You might, for example, choose to include a splash page on your Web site. You can use the meta information to force the page to change within a given time span using the sample code that follows: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="time in seconds, URL of the new page" /> Splash Page
If you have a page that you update several times a day and you want to make sure that people always see the most recent version, you can enter the page's own URL in the refresh tag. When the browser sees the refresh tag, it presents the requested URL in the specified time. <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="time in seconds, URL for this page" /> Caution
Expiration DatesIf you have a page that you change frequently, you can specify an expiration date in the <meta> tag to ensure that the Web browser looks for a newer version (rather than displaying an older version, which might still be stored in the browser's memory). Look at the example that follows: <meta http-equiv="expires" contents="Wed, 04 December 2006 00:00:00 GMT" /> When you enter the URL for this page in your browser, it checks its history files to see whether a copy is stored there. If so, it checks the meta information to see whether this page is still valid. If the expiration date has passed, the browser looks to the Web for a more recent copy before displaying the page. Table 3.3 reminds you of the formatting tags you learned in this lesson.
In this lesson, you've learned:
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