Examples
Information inside a meta element describes the document.
Information inside a meta element describes the document's keywords.
This example demonstrates how to redirect a user if your site address has changed.
The Meta Element
As we explained in the previous chapter, the head element contains generalinformation (meta-information) abouta document.
HTML also includes a meta element that goes inside the head element. Thepurpose of the meta element is to provide meta-information about the document.
Most often the meta element is used to provide information that is relevantto browsers or search engines likedescribing the content of your document.
Note: W3C states that "Some user agents support the use of META to refresh the current page after a specified number of seconds, with the option of replacing it by a different URI. Authors should not use this technique to forward users to different pages, as this makes the page inaccessible to some users. Instead, automatic page forwarding should be done using server-side redirects" athttp://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#adef-http-equiv.
Keywords for Search Engines
Some search engines on the WWW will use the name and content attributes of the meta tag to index your pages.
This meta element defines a description of your page:
<meta name="description" content="Free Web tutorials on HTML, CSS, XML, and XHTML"
/>
This meta element defines keywords for your page:
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, DHTML, CSS, XML, XHTML, JavaScript"
/>
The intention of the name and content attributes is to describe the content of a page.
However, since too many webmasters have used meta tags for spamming, like repeating keywords to give pages a higher ranking, some search engines have stopped using them entirely.
You can read more about search engines in our Web Building Tutorial.
Unknown Meta Attributes
Sometimes you will see meta attributes that are unknown to you like this:
<meta name="security" content="low" />
Then you just have to accept that this is something unique to the site or to the author of the site, and that it has probably no relevance to you.
You can see a complete list of the meta element attributes in our
Complete
HTML 4.01 Tag Reference.
Last news from Google:Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking
Monday, September 21, 2009 at 10:00 AM
Recently Google team received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn't use) the "keywords" meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob's site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her "keywords" meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words "AliceCo" to his "keywords" meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?
At least for Google's web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.
Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. Google does sell a Google Search Appliance, and that product has the ability to match meta tags, which could include the keywords meta tag. But that's an enterprise search appliance that is completely separate from our main web search. Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present.
Q: Why doesn't Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:
Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.
Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag?
A: It's possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it's unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.
Yahoo Search No Longer Uses Meta Keywords Tag
Oct 6, 2009 at 2:15pm ET
And then there were none. Yahoo has long been the only major search engine that supported the meta keywords tag. However, the search engine revealed today that like the other majors, it no longer supports it.
Cris Pierry, senior director of search at Yahoo, to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.
Bing doesn’t support the keywords tag too
On the Search Engine Land internet magazine wrote that "Bing doesn’t support the tag".
In the same time on the official site of Bing we find the following:
"The tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content".
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