How to Use Meta Tags

Hi,
Let us take a look at the different types of meta tags, that can be used in a website. This will give an idea to you, on how to use meta tags. The list of such meta tags is very long and hence we will take a look at some of the most important meta tags.

Meta Author
This meta tag typically holds the name of the author of the webpage. The email id of the author can also be put in this meta tag. However, this meta tag is not supported by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN.
Syntax: <METANAME="Author"CONTENT="name, email id">

Meta Content Language
The language that you are using on your webpage, can be mentioned in this meta tag. Some search engine robots use this meta tag to categorize your webpage by language.
Syntax: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="language">

Meta Content Type
This is one of the most important meta tags. It is advisable to use this meta tag for all your web pages. The use of this meta tag causes the appropriate character set to be loaded, before the webpage is loaded.
Syntax: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="content type, text or html">

Meta Description
This is another important meta tag. Here, you can mention in brief, within a limited number of characters, what your web page is all about. This is the portion that is generally searched by search engine robots, to find out if the searched phrase is present in your website or not.
Syntax: <META NAME="description" CONTENT="type your description here">

Meta Keywords
Along with the words and phrases in the content and description, meta keywords are also often used by search engines, to sort a webpage into their search engine results. Hence, providing meta keywords into your web page can prove to be quite beneficial.
Syntax: <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="type your keywords separated by comma">

Meta Title
This meta tag can contain the same title as that within the TITLE, html tag. You can use this meta tag in your webpage too.
Syntax: <META NAME="Title" CONTENT="Page Title Here">

Meta Google
The meta Google tag is specially used by the Google search engine. You can use this tag in your webpage to stop Google from displaying excerpt or cached content. There are other features too, that you can specify using the Google meta tag. For example, you can mention that you do not want Google to rank or popularize the link of your webpage.