<META>

Contains a list of items

Use to provide information to servers and browsers that is not available through normal HTML tags. This tag is most often used to provide controlled descriptions and keywords to search engines. The automated systems that access pages and categorize them will take information defined by the <META> tag and use it before they use the actual content of the page.

        <html>
        <head>
        <title>Some Title</title>
==>>    <meta name="Description" content="Some description.">
        </head>
        <body>
            .
            .
            .
            .
        </body>
        </html>

This is about the only way you can control how your page is indexed and described by the search engines. Some program (referred to as robots, web crawlers and other names) retrieves your pages from your website. The program then goes through your page and pulls out all the text, other than comments, and creates pointers to your page based on those words. Some of the search engines then take the first bit of text on your page and creates a "description" for your page. That's what you see when you use a site, such as Alta Vista, to search for pages containing certain words or phrases.

These programs are trying to be efficient and will use information given by the <META> tag before they use the actual content of the page. Unfortunately, the labels that you are supposed to use in this tag are not defined as a standard. Each browser or web page server can have it's own definitions for the information it will recognize. I've found two that are useful for feeding search engines - description and keywords.

As an example, if you specify the following lines in the <HEAD> section:

    <meta name="description" content="Tarot Readings using the Thoth deck.">

    <meta name="keywords" content="tarot, thoth, Aleister Crowley, occult, fortune telling">

your page would be pulled up for any hit on any of the words in both content fields. The entry would show a description of "Tarot Readings using the Thoth deck." At Alta Vista, they'll use up to 1,024 characters of this information to store your page. But don't get any clever ideas about repeating words a lot to get top spaces on lists. Most of the search sites now ignore pages with more than 6 or 7 uses of the same word.

Notice in the example how I used name on one of the lines and http-equiv on the next. Both of them could have been one or the other. The actual structure shows name, description and http-equiv all together. The http-equiv element is supposed to be the server recognized name.

HTML 3.0 Draft: Nothing new is added but the description is much better. Still no list of values to use for names and equivalancies. In some examples, the specification shows http-equiv values of "Expires" and "Reply-to". The content for "Expires" would look like "Tue, 22 Oct 1996 13:41:02 EDT". The content for "Reply-to" would look like "mrusk@radix.net (Mike Rusk)".
Netscape: Utilizes an http-equiv label of "refresh", a content value of the number of seconds (e.g. "2") and a URL attribute that gives the address of the page to load. This particular combination is used to perform some staged loading in order to create special effects.
Microsoft IE: Nothing special.
Internationalization: Nothing special.

Table of HTTP-EQUIV values
*HTTP-EQUIV*	CONTENT EXAMPLE	COMMENTS
Reply-to	"mrusk@radix.net (Mike Rusk)"	Used to supply an e-mail address to automated page scanners
Description	"Some description of the contentsof the page. Can be multiple sentences."	Used to provide a description of your page that will be used by those sites that can use the description.
Keywords	"key1, key phrase2, key3, key4, key phrase6, key 7"	Used to provide keywords to search engines. You can specify several <META> statemtents using the "keywords" and the search engine will treat them all as one continuous, comma separated list.
Expires	"Tue, 22 Oct 1996 15:33:37 EDT"	Used to provide an expiration date for those browsers that will check the date on the page in local cache and get a new page if the old one has expired. Supposedly this lets you make sure your viewers have the latest version of your page.

HELP: If you have other HTTP-EQUIV values and examples of their contents, I would like to include them in this table. Please let me know if you can contribute. Thanks. mr

The Rusk Family . . . "the Legend Continues"

Michael T. Rusk
Comments to author: mrusk@radix.net