Meta Data - Confused

[Pavanne]

I'm really new to HTML and have been teaching myself from books.

However, I just CAN'T get my head around the purpose of meta data. Please can somebody explain to me in clear English what it is for and what should be put in that element?

All the books I have looked at try to explain it too technically and I end up getting more confused.

I have bypassed this in order to learn the rest of the HTML coding, but I'm sure the meta data is there for a reason and could be vital. Therefore, any explanation of what it is / does would be wonderful.

Thanks.

[johneva]

There are a few diffrent meta tags but the important ones are description and keywords.

Code: Select all

<meta name="description" content="This is a websites for Tyres and Exhaust Man, we repair and replace tyres and exhausts" />

<meta name="keywords" content="car, engines, tyres, exhuasts" />


The decription one is used by some search engine as a description for your site in search quires. If you do a search in Google you will see that each site has a title and description in the results.

The keywords one is also used by search engines but this is telling the seach engine what are the word you would like to be found under. So in my example aslong as other factors are in SEO are good enough the site would be found under: Car or Car Exhusts or any other combination of the words I selected to enter in my keywords tag.

To be fair though most search engines dont take much notice of these meta tags anymore but that does not mean you should not use them.