<meta name="name" content="content"> or: <meta http-equiv="name" content="content">
Which format you should use depends on what type of meta tag you use. Use http-equiv if the meta information is designed to be interpreted by a web server or proxy. Use name if it is designed for a page editor or search engines. There are three attributes: name, content and http-equiv. Meta tags are not case sensitive, you could use upper or lower case.
Here is an example:
<head> <title>Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization</title> <meta name="description" content=" What are meta tags? They are hidden tags in the head section of your HTML documents..." /> <meta name="keywords" content="Meta tags, SEO, Search Engine Optimization" /> </head>
The HTML title tag isn't technically a meta tag, but is the most important tag, because search engins weigh it heavily in ranking your web page. The text of title tag will be used as the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP), It will also appear in browser reverse bar and the title in bookmark when users save the page to their favorites.
Think about the key terms you'd like your page to be found in search engines, then incorporate those terms into your title tag. The first words in the title tag and other tags are assumed to be given more weight, so put the most important words at the begining. Search engines give a lot of weight on the page title, the visible content of your page, and the links on the search results page pointing to your pages.
What is the limit length for the title tag? Google is supporting up to 70 characters in some cases, but you'd better not use more than 65 characters (including spaces). I like to use about 10-12 words in my title tags. I recommend not using an exact sentence pulled from your page copy as your title tag. Some blog software automatically generates the title tag from information you provide somewhere. In WordPress, the default is to use your blog name plus whatever you named the page. You could install the "SEO Title Tag" plug-in developed by Stephan Spencer for WordPress to tile it yourself.
This tag is used by some search engines to help categorize your site. The keywords are the search terms that people use to locate your site. Each keyword and keyword phrase should be separated with commas. The keywords meta tag is usually placed after the title and meta description tags in HTML document. Most search engines limit the total size of keywords to about 250 characters.
How to select keywords? The rule of the thumb is: put yourself into the mind of a user. Think about what key words or key phrases people would enter in search engines to get information they need. Try to choose your keywords as specificly as possible; overly broad keywords rarely work well. Also try to use these keywords on the content of your pages so long as they are relevant to the topic of your page, but do not overdue it. You could get penalized if you try to fool the search engines by repeating keywords, even if you are using different variations (ALL CAPS, different tenses, plurals, etc.). Never use keywords that are not relevant to your page content.
Here is a good example for the keywords selection. There was one client who was looking for an acupuncturist. He typed in a keyword "acupunture" into a site's search query, but it was almost impossible for him to find the one he liked. The results were too many and too general including everything related to acupuncture. So then he added the city name to the keyword "acupuncture" and hit search again. This time he was able to find the local acupuncturist easily.
<meta http-equiv="robots" content="[noindex|nofollow]" />
For more information, check out the following search engine sites:
How Google would interpret meta tags
Ask Webmasters
Yahoo Search Ranking
Yahoo Search Basics
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=index.php"> <meta name="author" content="Rene Thomas Washington"> <meta http-equiv="expires" content="Sun, 13 April 2008 14:00:00 GMT"> <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="nocache"> <meta name="copyright" content="May 2008">
The content-type meta tag defines the content-type and character set of your web page. Make sure to surround the value of the content attribute with quotes since it can be any valid string. The charset attribute may not be interpreted correctly if you don't.
Use the refresh meta tag if you want to redirect the browser to a new URL or want to refresh the same page after a certain amount of time. If you set a delay time to zero, the redirection will go very fast, but not all browsers support this redirect. If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, you'd better use a server-side 301 redirect instead.
Use the pragma meta tag if you update your page very frequently and do not want the browsers to store a page copy in the cache.
The expires meta tag is useful when you want the browser to get a new copy of your page from the server after a certain amount of time. If you update a page every month, you would want to set the expiration date a little before one month.