Meta Tags

Meta elements are (X)HTML elements which provide structured rendering data about a web page. The meta element has four valid attributes: content, http-equiv, name and scheme. Of these four attributes, only content is required.

Content Type Declaration

Firstly, there's the content-type meta tag, which notifies the browser which set of characters the web page that is loading will use to render itself. A meta element with a content-type attribute is mandatory if you wish to have valid XHTML code. For those sites using an English set of characters, simply copy and paste the following code into your <head> area.

Site Description and Keywords

The description and keywords meta tags are what search engines use to index your site. The description tag declares a description of your site which you set, E.g. 'PokeNova is a Pokémon fan site for all ages!'. Whereas the keywords tag declares relevant search terms that your site complies with. For example, if you were to place 'pokenova, pokemon, websites, nickyn00' in your keywords tag, someone who uses a search engine to search for 'Nickyn00' will find your site in the search results. However, modern search engines such as Google tend to use page text for indexing, so you'll these tags are virtually useless. If you still wish to use these tags simply place the following code with the modifications below into your <head> area.

Description

Replace DESCRIPTION with a description of your site.

Keywords

Replace KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS with relevant keywords to your site. Separate each keyword with a comma(,).

Meta Redirect

Likely to be the most common meta element that you use, this handy element easily allows you to redirect your visitor to another web page. However, this element does not work at all in Internet Explorer 6, however with the release of Internet Explorer 8 I'd make a generalisation that you are safe to use this element.

Where the code has SECONDS, replace it with the amount of seconds you wish to pass after the web page finishes loading before your visitor is redirected, and replace URL with the URL of which the visitor will be redirected to. If you use this code you can put it anywhere in the <body> section for it to work. For example, if I wished to have my visitors redirected to Google three seconds after this page started loading, I would put 3; http://google.com/ in the content attribute.

Despite all these meta tags I previously mentioned, there are far more out there. For example, there's a meta tag which tells search engines not to index the page loading, however I only included the meta tags which I thought would be relevant to the average Pokémon fan site. If you wish to know more about meta elements, simply do a Google search.