<META NAME=KEYWORDS CONTENT="pumpkin pumpkins Halloween squash">

When someone does a search on one of these words, your page will be in the listing. KEYWORDS also increases you "score" in the search. When someone enters a search, the search engine tries to figure out which pages seem most relevent to that search, and lists those first. One of the scoring criteria is <META ...> keywords. If the search words are in the keywords, the page gets a higher score. This is a good way to increase your page's visibility a little. Unfortunately, this has led to the practice of "spamdexxing", putting many repititions of the same word in <META ...> keywords. The search engines now use special algorithms to detect spamdexxing pages and won't index those pages.

<META NAME=DESCRIPTION CONTENT="..."> designates the text to display when the search engine returns information about your page. If no description is given, the search engines usually return the the first 175 or so characters of the page, not counting the HTML tags. For example, consider a page that starts off like this:

Recycling Systems Corporation

1425 East Marina Street, San Jose, CA 77235
(513) 789-1921, info@.rsc.com

RSC is one of the leading companies in the industry, offering municipalities an array of recycling and waste disposal options unparralled by anyone else. With capabilities ranging from street collection to refuse differentiation, RSC can bring a new definition of municipal waste reduction to your home town.

If there is no <META ...> description, the search engine will display something like this (both of these examples come from Infoseek, but Alta Vista and Webcrawler are very similar):

Recycling Systems Corporation
1425 East Marina Street, San Jose, CA 77235 (513) 789-1921, info@rcs.idocs.com RSC is one of the leading companies in the industry, offering municipalities an array of recycling …

However, if you have a <META ...> description like this:

<META NAME=DESCRIPTION CONTENT="RSC is a leading recycling and waste 
management company providing creative waste handling services for 
communities across the USA.">

then the search engine returns a much cleaner description:

Recycling Systems Corporation
RSC is a leading recycling and waste management company providing creative waste handling services for communities across the USA.

Although the CONTENT attribute can technically hold up to 1024 characters (as can any attribute value), the search engines only display approximately the first 175 characters (depending on spacing) so be sure to keep your description within that limit.

Other Less Used Tags

Tells them who made the page. Who cares, though?

Tells the search engine to visit your site again in 30 days. This is good if your sites description, keywords, or material changes often.

Tells the search engine that your site is meant for everyone, and that it can be distributed globally. You can also specify "local" and "IU". IU means Internal Use, which means that it's basically not meant for the public.

This next one tells the spider to not use a cached version of your website, and instead to use the most up-to-date version by downloading the site directly. A cached copy is a virtual snapshot of your web page that is used so that it's already on the engine's server, therefore letting user's download the page faster. The disadvantage is when your page contains info that is updated often and possible has time-sensitive data, like news or recent announcements. So, if you have that kind of time sensitive data, use the "no-cache" option.

Ay, mates. In order to make another page load automatically, which is helpful when redirecting your visitors to a new address, you need to use the mighty meta tag. This is how it goes:

The "http-equiv" part means nothing to me, but I bet it's there for a reason so don't forget to include it. Whatever it is, it equals "refresh", which is definitely the thing you are trying to do, right? Right. So let's continue. The part that says "content=10; url=http://www.here.com/newpage.html" is the part of the code that says that the page specified will load after 10 seconds.

There are some other META tags, also. Check out these "robot" tags that tell search engines whether or no to index the page, and whether or not to index pages that are linked to. There are many combinations of the robot tag. *Not all search engines can handle the robot tags as of now, but I'm sure they all will soon. It can't hurt to use them.

And you can put all these together by just lining them up like so: