Web Clinic: META Tags - University of Maryland - Office of Information Technology (OIT)

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	META tags META tags aid in controlling how your web pages appear in some search engines. The two META tag attributes used are "description" and "keywords" which control how your web page summaries appear in the search results of some search engines and what type of keyword searches will display your web page. META tag format META tag information is not displayed on your web page. Placement: inside <header> tags at beginning of your HTML file Format: <META name="attribute" content="value of attribute"> Example: <META name="description" content="Learn about how META tags can be used to control how your web pages appear in some search engines. See how different search engines index their pages."> <META name="keywords" content="meta tag, search engine, index"> How is this displayed? META Tag Tutorials W3C's META tag specification A Dictionary of HTML META Tags Dr. Clue's HTML Guide - META Tags How To Use Meta Tags Back to Basics: META Tags IMS Specification Using IMS Meta-data Comment Tags Some search engines do not use META tags so you may want to include a comment tag in your file with the same information. Format: <!-- your comments here --!> How Search Engines Index Pages Search Engine Features Comparison Chart Alta Vista Excite HotBot Infoseek Lycos Northern Lights WebCrawler Search Engine Submission Resources Priming the Search Engines Robots You can control whether or not your web page is indexed by a search engine by using the "robots" attribute. Note: Not all search engines recognize this META tag. Format: <META name="robots" content="all \| none \| index \| noindex \| follow \| nofollow"> Since not all search engines recognize this META tag, you can also use the robots.txt file to control indexing of your page. Published 2/9/98. Last revised 11/24/98.