Author generated HTML commands that are placed in the head section of an HTML document. Current popular meta tags that can affect search engine rankings, are Meta Keywords, and Meta Description. Meta KEYWORDS tag is used to group a series of words that relate to a website. These tags can be used by search engines to classify pages for searches.
The Meta DESCRIPTION is used to describe the document. The meta description is then displayed in search engine results.
The Robots Meta Tag is used to control certain aspect of how a search engine indexes the page.
An HTTP-EQUIV meta tag can sometimes be used to issue some server HTTP commands. Most common is a HTTP REFRESH command. Gaining in popularity is a NOCACHE command to thwart server caching of a page.
Other useful tags are the CHAR SET tag to describe the document language and character set. The Author meta tag and the Generator meta tag (software used to generate the page).
