"Meta Tags might not be as important as they were before; but we still love them. Want to know what your meta tags are? We can help you out with our free-to-use tool!"

The Most- Used Meta Elements

Meta elements are hidden messages built into the structure of a web page. They can play an important role in determining how the web page will be interpreted by browsers and search engines.

Meta tags come in a wide range of different forms, but there is one characteristic that they all share. Meta tags are a form of meta information. This means that they provide information about information, in this case about the information that you have provided in the content of your website. The web page contains information about the subject of your web document. The meta elements contain information about the document itself.

Meta elements can be divided into two types. Both are placed within the web page's 

 element. They may be either meta name elements, in the form  or meta http-equiv tags, in the form . The "name" section is replaced by the name of the tag type, such as "description" or refresh". The "content" section is replaced by the information that you want the tag to provide or make available for use.





The http-equiv tags are usually intended to be used for tags that emulate HTTP headers, while the name tags are used for other types of purposes. Generally, the http-equiv tags are directed towards servers and proxies, while the name tags are intended for use by editors and search engines.





Although there are more than 200 different ways in which you can use meta tags on a website, some meta elements are much more common than others. These are some of the most common meta name elements.





Description meta tags are used to provide a short description of what the webpage is about. This description will usually be presented in the list of search results to provide searchers with more information about the content.





Keywords meta elements are used to present search engines with a list of relevant keywords or phrases for the web page.





Distribution meta elements are used to determine whether search engines should consider the page to be global, local or internal.





Revisit (or Revisit-After) meta tags are used to specify how often search engines should come back to re-index the page, with the number of days placed in the content section in the form X Days.





Some other common meta name elements are google, googlebot, robots, verify, apple-touch-icon, format-detection, HandheldFriendly and viewport.





These are some of the most common http-equiv tags.





Refresh tags are used to send an internet browser to a new URL after a specified delay. It is used if you need to rename a web page, or if you have moved it to a new server or directory. In the content section, you specify the delay before the page should be refreshed, in seconds. You then specify the URL to which the browser should be redirected, in the form "delay;url=the new url".





Robots tags are used to provide directions to search engines in order to determine whether your web pages will be indexed or whether the search engine should follow the links on the page in order to find other web pages to index. For example, if you do not want the page to be indexed or the links followed, you should enter [noindex|nofollow] as the tag content. Search engines will otherwise index the page and follow all links.





Pragma tags are used to determine whether your web page will be cached. Caches are used to store copies of recently visited web pages on the hard drive so that they can be accessed quickly. However, if you update your web page frequently, you may want to use this tag to prevent browsers from caching the page in order to ensure that visitors will always see the most recent version. In order to do so, you would enter "nocache" into the content.





Expires tags are used, with the expiry date (for example Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:00:00 GMT) in the content position, to tell internet browsers when the page will become out of date.
The browser will then know when it should retrieve a new version from the server. Our host, KH2-Media, is not a big fan of this meta tag and recommends not using it too often.





The content-type tag is used to specify the right character set and content type for the page.





Language tags are used to specify the language used on a web page. This information can be useful for regional search engines.





Some other common meta http-equiv tags include default style, Cache-Control and Content-Disposition.





In addition to these common meta elements, there are many other types of meta tags. Some of the less commonly used meta elements include tags such as the meta name tags application-name, author, classification, copyright, formatter, generator, and rating. Although these tags and the many others not named here occur less frequently, they can still provide some useful functions.





Meta tags can be a very useful tool when you are creating a website or working on a Search Engine Optimization strategy. If you would like to find out more about meta elements and how they are used then you should spend some time exploring the MetaScoop.com website.