Metatags are special tags inserted into the head of an HTML document to help the
process of indexing.
Meta tags in html are optional.
If you simply produce your home page and register the URL with a
search engine, or a number of search engines, their spider programmes
will (eventually) index it anyway.
Meta tags are used by some search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes.
You may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by using meta tags.
Nobody can tell you exactly what effect meta-tags have! They
do not seem to cause harm.
How to Insert Meta Tags
You should insert the meta tag element in the HEAD of your document,
just after the <TITLE> element. It follows the usual form of
tags, ie
<META name="something" content="something else">
You needn't have a </META> at the end of the
tag, the way that you do with something like <BOLD> bold </BOLD>.
However, make sure that each tag does not include any line breaks, since
this confuses some bots.
If you insert meta tags by hand you should probably use a text editor (e.g. Notepad).
The most important meta tags are:
<META name="resource-type" content="document">
The only resource type that is currently in use is "document"
This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes,
but use of the others is a good idea.
<META name="description" content="a description of
your page">
Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with
the title of your page in an index. "content" could be a
word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this
reasonably short, concise and to the point.
The description
tag should not simply restate the title of the page, it should
describe the page.
Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, seperated by
commas. Remember to include synoyms, americanisms and so on. So, if
you had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as
car, cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.
There is no need to index every single file that you've got on
your site - just choose a few representative samples.