Advanced Meta tags

There are two types of META tags:

• HTTP-EQUIV META tags
• And META NAME tags

META NAME tags are the ones most people first learn about. For example, the keywords META tag is a META NAME tag because it has the word "name" in the code.

HTTP-EQUIV META tags:

Specifying Content Type and Character Set
The Content-Type tag allows you to specify the media type (i.e. text/html) and the character set. As different languages have different default character sets, this can be important in ensuring that your page displays correctly in all browsers.

Specifying Language
The content-language META tag is important to directories, search engines or other agents that are looking for websites in a specific language.

The Expires/Pragma Combination
The Expires and Pragma tags are meant to control browser caching. Theoretically, they will ensure that an end-user will be viewing a fresh copy of your page and not a copy cached in the History folder of a browser. Netscape seems to obey these META tags more accurately than Internet Explorer.

Refresh Your Page
The refresh META tag is used to refresh a web page every x seconds or to redirect a page to another page in x seconds. For example, the following code would redirect you to our homepage in 3 seconds.

META NAME Tags

The important META NAME Tags (such as keywords, robots and description) were explained in our Introduction to META Tag optimization. But there are still hundreds of obscure META NAME tags we haven't discussed.