HTML and "Meta" tags: can the author of a Web site specify how her work is indexed by machines and presented to visitors? Meta tags can sometimes help. (Although not all search engines use them.) Meta tags are embedded within the <HEAD> section of a web document to include useful information that might be extracted by machine for identifying, indexing and cataloguing documents. Meta tags are not displayed by a web browser because they are in the <HEAD> section of the HTML, but they can affect the behavior of search engine software (and some browsers) in how a web page is indexed, and they can add useful keywords not on the main page. (In addition, may Meta tags will also affect whether a web browser will display certain pages, for example, adult websites in a browser equipped to block them. See below.)
Note: Meta tags can include commands, descriptions or words. (A well-known tech command is the "REFRESH" command that can be used to re-direct web browsers to different pages.) However, I'm discussing Meta tags for providing content about a web page--in other words, cataloging information.
Dublin Core. A few years ago the library cataloging consotium OCLC created a basic specialized set of Meta tags called the "Dublin Core" (after Dublin, Ohio, where OCLC is headquartered). This web page uses some underlying Dublin Core, but I implemented it better (using the University of Bath's DC.dot described below), at the Gilder Lehrman Collection (formerly online at www.gilderlehrman.com) and the American Printing History Association (for which I volunteer) web sites. [More on Dublin Core].
Spexxxial Uses! Meta tags are also used to distinguish adult content from general content. ("Adult content" in the U.S. usually means the content has something to do with sex and sexual activity.) Until 2000, there were two primary registrars for labeling sites with adult content, the ICRA and RSAC. Information was formerly encoded in "PICS" tags, embedded in the same section as your Meta tags. To generate PICS META tags for your pages see the ICRA(formerly RSAC). A separate organization, Surf Safely, has a search engine that lists PICS-labelled sites "that comply with its own value-based criteria." See its SafeSurf generators. Using these tags may ensure you don't get blocked improperly by filters like Netnanny. They rely upon an honor system to work. The system walks you through an online questionnaire which, once submitted, rates your site for nudity, violence, profanity, etc. PICS tags are quite different from Dublin Core.
Incidentally, some of the pages for this personal website were developed without Meta tags and then submitted to search engines to check how they ranked. Meta tags helped in some cases, but writing good text also helped!
I have here an anonymous Javascript for generating meta tags, feel free to try.
More pages of notes and links relating to two other
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