Explanation of meta tags and the importance of them.
In the html head there is space to add meta tags. These meta tags have different meanings and purposes. In order to use them wisely you need to know what they are for.
Meta tags have the following structure
<meta name="" content="" />
Meta tags are inserted into the html <head> tag.
This is a list of the most common ones.
Description
Example: <meta name="description" content="Write your description here" />
Search Engines will look at your description and use it to get a quick overview of what this page is about. For this reason every page should have a own unique description. Having the same description for all your pages will most likely confuse a search engine and you might not rank as well as if you would have unique ones.
Keywords
Example: <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3" />
The keyword meta tag will help search engines to find easily keywords for your page. You should ensure that the keywords within this tag also appear in the text of your website. If you use them wisely you can rank quite well in search engines. If you want to check if people search for a specific keyword you can check at googles trend website at http://www.google.com/trends.
There are also many other meta tags which are mostly ignored by search engined but it doesn't harm to add them as well.
Title
Example: <meta name="title" content="Website title" />
This should be the same as in the html tag <title></title>.
Copyright
Example: <meta name="copyright" content="Your Copyright Statement" />
It is important to know that this tag will not stop anyone from copying your content.
Author
Example: <meta name="author" content="Your Name" />
Search Engines will not pay much attention to this meta tag but if you have a website with content from different individuals you can add this tag to make it clearer what contents belong to which author.
Revisit
Example: <meta name="revisit-after" content="5 days" />
If a robot visits your website you can tell him when to come back. This does not mean that he actually will come back. If you do not change your content regularly, you probably don't need to add this tag.
Expires
Example: <meta name="expires" content="Tue, 01 Jun 1999 19:52:05 GMT" />
Sometimes website have content which will expire on a specific date like Vacancies. By setting this tag the search engine will know when to delete it from the database. Again this does not mean that they actually will do it. Since the search engines have multiple servers you might consider setting the expire date 1 or 2 days before the content actually expires so that they can delete the entry on all servers by that date.
Language
Example: <meta name="language" content="de" />
For websites with english content this tag doesn't need to be added to the website. If your website is in a language other than english you should add this meta tag to make it easier for search engines to determine what language it is in.
