This little tutorial is to explain what the <meta> tag is used in HTML on web pages. When i started working on HTML I always wondered what this tag was used for. Finally, I understand why they are important to have on all your webpages. As a webmaster, its important to make your websites search engine friendly.

There are two reasons to use meta tags:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Browser Behavior

- Search Engine Optimization -
Meta tags give information to search egines whey they are crawling your website. for example, google uses meta tags to confirm owenership of a website.

- Browser Behavior -
Meta tags also affect browser behavios. one meta tag i can thinkg of is you can use it to redirect to another page.

Setting the page's language
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">

Setting the page's character set
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Meta Refresh - Refreshing the page after 10 seconds
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="10">

Meta Redirect - Redirecting the page to hotmail.com after 10 seconds
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="10; URL=http://www.wallpaperama.com">

Meta Cache - Instruct the browser not to cache the page
<meta http-equiv="pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">

example below.

Example
CODE:
<HEAD profile="http://www.giantco.com/profiles/common">
<META name="Author" content="Jane Smith">
<META name="keywords" content="benefits,insurance,plan">
<META http-equiv="refresh"
content="1;URL=http://www.giantco.com/truindex.html">
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-5">
</HEAD>