Hello class! Today we will be learning meta tagging. Okay, let's begin.
Meta tagging is used mainly for Search Engines. It can provide a discription of your page, as well a key words, author, expiration date, and much more. It is only really used for providing a discription and key words for which certain search engines will detect. Most of the other uses are not commonly used.
The tags are to be put in the heading of your HTML (if you use the HTML heading commands which are not nessesary...if you don't, then it can be put anywhere, but close to the top is standard). The meta command, "name", will define the function of the meta tag, and the command, "content", will give a value to the function. Here is an exaple:
This meta tag defines your keywords as "dog", "cat", "horse", and "cabbit". The command, "name", can be substituded for the command, "http-equiv", when the documents are being retrieved via the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It doesn't matter which you use, they will both produce the same results. So the above example can also be written as:
The other commonly used meta tag uses the "name", DESCRIPTION. It will work as a summary for some internet search engines. Here is an example of this tag:
<meta NAME="description" CONTENT="This web page has lots of info in cats, dogs, horses, and the occational cabbit.">
The summary of your page when found by, let's say, AltaVista's search engine will be: "This web page has lots of info in cats, dogs, horses, and the occational cabbit."
Besides description and keywords, the commonly used tags, there are author tags:
<meta NAME="copyright" CONTENT="1997 University of Washu">,
rating tags:
<meta NAME="rating" CONTENT="mature">,
and many more.
For these tags, let's take author for example, to be useful to a search for your page, the person searching would have to know how to search by author instead of keywords (enter "author:Ms. Washu" into the spot for key words). Since not many people know that, these tags (except for keywords and description) are not very useful.
There is one other use for meta tags. It will prompt a site to refresh after a given amount of time. This can be very neat and useful. It uses the "name", REFRESH. An example is:
<meta NAME="refresh" CONTENT="5">
This will refresh the current site (only once) automatically after 5 seconds. REFRESH can also open another site after a given amount of time:
This will open up http://www.geocities.com/tokyo/flats/3544/ after 20 seconds. If that line of code was put on http://www.geocities.com/tokyo/flats/3544/ then it would cause an infinate loop because 20 seconds after the site is reopened (not simply refreshed) it will reopen again, which will reopen again, and again, into infinity or until the "BACK" button is pressed (which will break the loop, sending the browser to the previous site).
