Meta Tags are the information inserted in the area of the HTML code of your web pages, where apart from the Title Tag, it contain information about your pages. other information inserted is not visible to the person surfing your web page but is intended for the search engine crawlers. Meta Tags are included so that the Search Engine are able to list your site in their indexes more accurately.

What can I include in a Meta tag?

There are basically four major Meta tags that you can use:

• <META name="resource-type" content="document">
• The only resource type that is currently in use is "document" This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes, but use of the others is a good idea.

• <META name="description" content="a description of your page">
• Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. "Content" could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point. However, don't be so mean with your description that its not an appropriate reflection of the contents!

• <META name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords">
• Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, separated by commas. Remember to include synonyms, americanisms and so on. So, if you had a page on cars, you might want to include keywords such as car, cars, vehicles, automobiles and so on.

• <META name="distribution" content="one of several">
• Content should contain either global, local or iu (for Internal Use). To be perfectly honest, I can't quite get my head around this one; its supposed to list available resources designed to allow the use to find things easily, but I still don't quite get it. My advice is to stick to "global".