A Meta Tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their induces. All meta tags should be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. Here is a list of the most common used meta tags:
<meta name="description" content="website description here">
Your website description
<meta name="language" content="english">
The language your website is in
<meta name="author" content="Your Name">
The name of the website creator
<meta name="email" content="you@yourdomain.com">
Your email address
<meta name="copyright" content="2020 Your Name">
Copyright information
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
Tells the search engines when to re-index your site
<meta name="keywords" content="your, keywords, here">
Most used words in your website (for search engine indexing)
Most search engines allow around 10 keywords
<meta name="expires" content="Dec. 31, 2020">
The date your website will expire (search engines
will stop indexing your site after this date)
<meta name="rating" content="general">
The rating of your website's content
(General/Mature/Restricted/14 Years)
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
the content type of your website
(this tag should always be used)
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10">
Specifies a delay in seconds before the browser
automatically reloads the web page
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;url=http://www.youdomain.com/">
Redirects the user to the specified website
after a specified amount of time
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true">
Prevents Internet Explorer 6 from turning certain words or phrases
on your page into links that go to an advertisers website
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache">
Specifies the action of cache agents. Possible values:
Public = may be cached in public shared caches
Private = may only be cached in private cache
no-cache = may not be cached
no-store = may be cached but not archived
<meta http-equiv="Window-target" content="_top">
Specifies the named window of the current page; can be used
to stop a page appearing in a frame with many browsers
_blank = always opens a new window
_self = opens in the current window
_top = the uppermost window available
_parent = the window immediately above the current window
<meta name="robots" content="NOFOLLOW">
Controls search engine robots on a per-page basis
NOINDEX = prevents anything on the page from being indexed
NOFOLLOW = prevents the crawler from following the links
on the page and indexing the linked pages
NOIMAGEINDEX = prevents the images on the page from being indexed
but the text on the page can still be indexed
NOIMAGECLICK = prevents the use of links directly to the images,
instead there will only be a link to the page
