META TAGS

META tags are a small, but crucial part of every web site on the Internet. In essence, META tags provide information about your web site or web page to the Internet. Think about it like this. When you look through a TV Guide, you see titles of programs and sometimes a brief description about it. Then, it is up to you to select a program to watch. Well, META tag are the TV Guide of the Internet. They give you the title, description, and much more of web sites and then it is up to you to select a web site to visit.

There are several different types of META tags. The most common META tags are:



The keywords META tag is a listing of words or phrases about the web site. The description META is a brief and to the point desciption about the web site. This is not a place for you avid writers our there to begin writing your version of the Great American Novel ; ).
A good rule of thumb is to choose between 5 - 7 keywords to describe your web site and list them in the order of importance. It is also a good idea to keep your description to under 255 characters in length. Some search engines will completely skip over your description tag if it is longer than this.

The keywords and description META tags are discussed further in our Search Engines tutorial.

Some other types of META tags are:




The HTTP-EQUIV is a standard META tag that appears in every web page and tells what type of document is being displayed. The title META tells the title of the page and the author META tag tells who authored the page.

Always remember that no matter how well you designed your web site, it will never get the attention and repeat web traffic it so richly deserves without an effective and well formed set of META tags!

http://www.aspwebpro.com/tutorials/html/metatags.asp