SEO By The Page – 4. General Meta Tags

The whole concept of meta tags is poorly understood by most amateur web page coders. Meta is a word that comes from the Greek meaning after, beyond, or adjacent. In general we can think of it as meaning about, so metadata is information about something and, thus, the individual meta tag is used to convey information about some specific concept in the HTML/XHTML document.

Technically, according to Wikipedia, meta tags are "HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes. The meta element has four valid attributes: content, http-equiv, name, and scheme. Of these, only content is a required attribute."

That's a mouth full so you may want to read it a couple of times for it to sink in. In a nut shell, meta tags provide extra information about things that have to do with the HTML/XHTML document (your web page). Meta tags look like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4">
<meta name="description" content="Description text goes here.">
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 2009 by Online Selling Association">
<meta name="numerals" content="0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9">

Meta tags are always located in the head section of an HTML/XHTML document. If you don't know about the head section see the SEO By The Page article on General HTML Page Construction. It is incorrect to place meta tags anywhere else in the page.

There are no specific meta tags. As the numerals tag shown above indicates you can specify any name you like for a meta tag and provide whatever content you wish to go in it. Meta tags can be used to provide identification information that is relevant only to you or the people that own the web page. Meta tags can, in fact, be used to convey any information at all. There are, however, typical meta tags that we need to be familiar with for SEO purposes. The two most common are the keywords and description meta tags. Details of these will be covered individually in other SEO By The Page articles.