How Do I...Add Metatags?

Metatags tags should go in the <head> area of your HTML document, after the <title> tag. Metatags are important for two reasons:

The description metatag will show below the title when your document displays in search engine results; having a good description will clarify the content of your document for people searching the web. (If there is no description metatag, then browsers will often just pull the first few lines of text from the document. This often is not the best "description" of what is important in the document.)
Various search engines will use metatags as sources of important words for generating indexes. The use of metatags (by search engines) varies, but it does not hurt to have metatags to describe key concepts in your document.

A metatag is limited to 1024 characters (some 10 plus lines if you have 80 characters in a line). That is not much of a limitation, but be aware of it.

Three metatags you may want to use:

Here are some metatags you should consider using:

<meta name="description" content="text goes here to describe what your document is about">

If you use both a <title> tag and the description metatag, then a search result pointing to your document will display both the title (not the filename) and your description underneath the title. This is an extremely important tag to place in your document. Add this tag in even if you do not use any others. Do not make the TITLE and the DESCRIPTION the same. The description is a supplement to the TITLE and should further explain the purpose of the document.

<meta name="keywords" content="put keywords or synonyms here, separated with a comma and space">

To be on the safe side, repeat here any important words that describe your content. Remember to consider synonyms as they are relevant. For example, if your document discusses growing oranges, but you felt it would be relevant to someone searching with the word citrus, then add this word as a keyword.

<meta name="author" content="Christopher Ward">

Using an author's name would be appropriate only in certain documents. If someone is looking for material done by a specific Web author, adding an author metatag helps when the author is not given in the text itself.

A complete example of a sample metatag section is:

<html>
<head>
<title>Kennesaw State University</title>
<meta name="description" content="Kennesaw State University, located in Kennesaw, Georgia, was cited by U.S. News & World Report to be one of the country's top up-and-coming regional colleges in the 1990, 1991, and 1992 editions of its Guide to America's Best Colleges.">
<meta name="keywords" content="university, georgia, atlanta, kennesaw, alumni, student, academics, education, business, science, art, international, technology, athletics">
<meta name="author" content="Christopher Ward">
</head>
<body>
body of document goes here
</body>
</html>

How the metatag information is displayed in search results will vary with the search engine, but normally, if there is a description metatag in the HEAD section, that will be displayed under the title in search results. The web document coded above would display this way in search results:

Kennesaw State University: Kennesaw State University, located in Kennesaw, Georgia, was cited by U.S. News & World Report to be one of the country's top up-and-coming regional colleges in the 1990, 1991, and 1992 editions of its Guide to America's Best Colleges.; Although the keywords may not display, they could be used by search engines as input into the databases for the search engines.

When you are looking at a document in a browser, you cannot tell if there are description or keyword metatags. If you look at the source code for the HTML file, you can see the tagging, however.