Adding Meta Tags to Your Web Site Using HTML

I'll begin this tutorial by admitting that Meta Tags appear to be of little importance these days. Once upon a time search engines used to rely quite heavily on Meta Tags to classify sites. Now the Big search engine, Google pays them no attention at all. There are those amongst the webmaster community who do not believe it is worth the time necessary to properly Meta Tag a site. Is it? That is for you to decide and this tutorial will teach you how to add the tags if you'd like to.

We'll discuss five Meta Tags. There are more, but, since all of the tags are handled using the same format, we'll just go over the most popular and, if you follow the format, you'll be able to add any tags you'd like.

The first Meta Tag we'll discuss is the description tag. Take a look at the code in the text area below.

An Explanation of the HTML

Placement : Meta tags are always placed in between the Head tags at the beginning of your document, before the body.

Format : All tags begin with the < followed by the word meta, space, name, the equals sign, quote, description, quote, space, content, equals sign, quote, whatever description you write about your site (describe your site carefully and in just a few words), quote, >. This code tells the robots reading the page that the tag describes your site using the description you wrote.

Description Meta Tags : Meta tags do not in any way show up on your visitors' computers. The tags are only used by the search engines and other robots that visit your site. A well-written description is a good thing to include as at least a handful of search engines still use word-for-word a site's description meta tag to describe a site in their search engine. As far as the importance of this tag, I use it only on the main pages of my sites. Remember to keep your description brief. Search engines usually truncate (cut-off) descriptions after a certain number of characters.

Other meta tags follow closely the format of the description tag. The next tag we'll look at is the keywords tag.

An Explanation of the HTML

Placement and Format : Placement and format mirrors that of the description meta tag. The only difference is that your meta tag name is "keywords" and, rather than write a description of your site, you're naming keywords (words you would expect a visitor to search for in a search engine to find your site).

Keywords : Not used as readily by search engines as the description tag, this is another tag I use only on my main page. Keywords should be written in all lower case letters, phrases should not have a comma between them. Choose only words that most closely describe your site and do not repeat the same word over and over again (search engines hate that!)

The next two meta tags I'm going to group together as they are both your personal (as webmaster identifiers). Let's look at the code below.

An Explanation of the HTML

Placement and Format : Placement and format are identical to the meta tags we discussed earlier with just the changes to naming the tag (ie. instead of "description", type "Author) and with different content added (ie. instead of describing your site, place your name or screen name)

The Author and Copyright Tags : The author and copyright meta tags are the only two I include on ALL of my pages. Why? I place these tags for other webmasters (who may view my code). These tags are a statement of ownership of your content and help protect your rights against theft of your site's layout and content. I recommend always including them.

The last tag we'll discuss is the generator tag, one that I find useless, but that a lot of authoring programs add in by default for the purpose of promoting their software.

An Explanation of the HTML

Placement and Format : Placement and format are the same as all meta tags; the only differences being the tag name (ie. instead of "description" it's "generator") and content value (ie. instead of describing your site, the program you used to author the html is entered)

The Generator Tag : I do my coding in Notepad which does not force a meta tag on you. There is no reason to include this tag, but many programs (FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc) add it by default. The purpose is to promote their software.