Meta Tags Guide

The purpose of this guide is to explain how to use meta tags and their attributes.
"HTML also includes a meta element that goes inside the head element. The purpose of the meta element is to provide meta-information about the document. Most often the meta element is used to provide information that is relevant to browsers or search engines like describing the content of your document."

-From w3schools.com

name Attribute

Attribute Name Value content Value
name description Website Description
keywords Website Keywords
author Website Author

These attributes have only one use: to help some search engines to index your site. However, notice I say "some". Most major search engines like Google do not use meta tags at all to index websites. However, it doesn't hurt to put it up.

The name attribute determines what the content attribute should be. If name is set to keywords, content should contain only one-word keywords. If name is set to description, content should contain only multi-word description phrases. Finally, if name is set to author, content should contain only the author's name. To use these attributes, use this code:

<meta name="description" content="Insert Website Description" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Insert Website Keywords" />
<meta name="author" content="Insert Website Author" />
If you view the source of this page (Ctrl+u in Firefox), you'll see the first codes after the opening head tag are the description and keywords meta tags. The value of description content is "AobaruNet, A Pokemon Fansite". Descriptions should generally be short and concise. Conversely, you can use as many one-word keywords in the keywords content as you want. I have fifteen, a small number compared to some other sites.

http-equiv Attribute

Attribute Name Value content Value
http-equiv content-type Varies (e.g., text/html;charset=UTF-8)
refresh (# of seconds until refresh);(URL to redirect to)
date Date when document was created
last-modified Date when document was last modified

content-type

Content-type simply defines the type of document and its encoding. An (X)HTML document must have this in order to be valid. The most common value is text/html;charset=UTF-8. 
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />

refresh

Refresh tells the browser to either automatically refresh or redirect the page. 
<meta http-equiv="refresh" 
content="5;http://www.aobarunet.eeveeshq.com/index.php" />
The content syntax is, first, the number of seconds to wait until the refresh/redirect (putting zero makes it refresh or redirect immediately); second, the semicolon; and third, the URL to redirect to (this is optional, leaving it out makes the page refresh). See an example here.

date

date is simply the date on which the current document was created. The content syntax is [day of the week], [day of the month] [month] [year] [time of the day]. 
<meta http-equiv="date" 
content="Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:31:00 EST" />

last-modified

last-modified is the date on which the current document last modified (changed). The content syntax is [day of the week], [day of the month] [month] [year] [time of the day]. 
<meta http-equiv="last-modified" 
content="Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:35:00 EST" />