Meta tag provides the information about your webpage. Meta tag is not essential in web page but is good to have it. You should place Meta tags inside the head section (<head> </head>) of your web page.  You can use Meta tags in the following ways:

  1. Use Meta tags to define the keywords for search engines.
  2. Use Meta tags to define the description of your web page.
  3. Redirect using Meta refresh.
  4. Define the most recent revision of the page.
  5. Define the HTTP headers to send to the client before serving actual page.
  6. Give the instructions to the search engine robots.

Use Meta tags to define keywords for search engines
You can tell the search engines for which keywords your site should appear in search results. But search engines are enough intelligent these days so this tag does not have much importance. Have a look at the following example how to use meta tags to define your keywords:

HTML Style:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″>

XHTML Style:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″>


Use Meta tags to define the description of your web page.
This Meta tag is still has some value and it is one of the low priority rankings factors in search engine. A typical example is:

< <meta name=”description” content=”This web site provides you the free information on web designing techniques.”>

Redirect using meta refresh
You can redirect your visitor to a specific url using meta tags:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5; URL=http://www.target-url.com “>

In above example content has the time interval in seconds after this time user will be redirected to the url specified in URL field of tag.

Define the most recent revision of the page
Define your page’s latest revision in the following way:

<meta name=”revised” content=”Mark price, 12/10/2008″ />

Define the HTTP headers to send to the client before serving actual page.
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html” />


Give the instructions to the search engine robots.
You can restrict the search engines by indexing your page’s content by using mata tag in the following way:

<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX”>