What is a meta-tag?
The META tag is primarily used to help search engines better index a document by supplying additional information about the document. The types of additional information that META tags can provide include an author’s name, a description or short abstract of a document, or a set of keywords for indexing a document. Providing this type of additional information should increase the chance that users will find your documents — the information they want — on the Web. In addition to providing indexing information, META tags can also be used to refresh a Web page or to redirect a user from one Web page to another. Not all search engines use the META tag. For example, AltaVista and InfoSeek use META tags for indexing but Excite does not. Because Penn uses the AltaVista search utility, document developers are encouraged to use META tags to improve the retrieval of their documents by the Penn community.
A meta tag is a line of HTML coding that contains metadata about a webpage. Meta tag information doesn’t change how the page looks; it won’t be seen by the website viewer, unless they are viewing your source code. There are two common types of meta tags — meta description tags and meta keywords tags. Meta description tags describe, in some way, the webpage. For instance for this wiseGEEK article page, we might use “everything you want to know about meta tags.” The meta keywords tag lists other words that a visitor might be searching for, like meta tags, meta tag, HTML and meta tags, tags, SEO. Both types of tags are located in the heading section of your HTML code and usually below the title. You might have the following heading for your webpage:
