<mega> Tag Examples

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />

Although not necessary, this specifies the language in which you page appears - eg. in this case, the U.S. version of English.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

This is required for your page to validate successfully. It instructs the browser (and the validator) what character set the server is using - eg. in this case, it's "utf-8". You don't really have any choice what you put in here. You should always put the character set that your server uses.

<meta name="Description" content="This page is about something." />

This will use "This page is about something." as the description of the page when it shows up in a search engine listing. Without a description <meta> tag, the search engines usually pick up the first 20 or so words in the <body> of the page.

<meta name="Keywords" content="boone, watauga, north carolina, nc, appalachian, pete montaldi" />

This will persuade search engines to index your page as if those words were in the <title> or <body>. The search engines usually don't put a lot of weight on these words - ie. it's better to actually have them in your <title> or <body>.

<meta name="Robots" content="all" />

This instructs search engines whether or not to index this page and how. Possible values for content are...

index : Search engine should index this page.
noindex : Search engine should not index this page.
follow : Search engine should follow links in this page and attempt to index those pages.
nofollow : Search engine should not follow links in this page.
all : Search engine should index this page AND follow links in this page and attempt to index those pages. You could also put "index, follow" and this would accomplish the same thing.

...you can mix and match - eg. valid contents include "noindex, follow"; "noindex, nofollow"; etc.

<meta name="author" content="montaldipa@appstate.edu" />

This identifies the author of the page. This could be helpful in instructing people who to contact in case of a problem with the page. Rather than an email address, you can also use the person's name, their department, etc.

Identifies copyright information pertaining to this page. Don't know what uses this.

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="60" />

Instructs the browser to reload this page every 60 seconds. The default is zero - ie. the browser loads the page when you click on a link or type in the url, and then lets it sit there forever. An application for this is Appalachian's Emergency Information page. If an emergency is declared, pages in this site will automatically refresh themselves every 60 seconds so that any new information will pop up automatically. In general, do not use this as it incurs usually needless bandwidth. For example, a user loads a page and then leaves their desk for an hour. If the page has this tag, the page will actually get hit 60 times before the user gets back. A variant of this tag is...

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;url=http://www.google.com" />

This will refresh the page with a new url - eg. in this case Google. This is a way of getting a page to automatically redirect a user to a different page. You've probably seen this before. Ever gone to a page and see a message like "This page has moved. If the browser does not redirect in 15 seconds, please click here"? If you have, that page probably had a tag like this and the content was something like "15;http://www.whatever.com/newpage.html" which means "goto http://www.whatever.com/newpage.html after 15 seconds".