META tags

<META> tags provide information about the document returned and are usually put before the <TITLE> tags. No closing tag is required! Most search engines rely on the information provided in the <META> tags when their robots read and index a web page.

Here are the common attributes and how they work:

name="name_of_the_meta_information" - Identifies a name with the meta-information.
content="data" - the content of the associated meta name.

Example META tags

Viewing HTML code to the homepage of this course will yield the following:
<META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Lozinski, http://www.erols.com/lozinski/">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="This is Lozinski's Beginner's HTML course, designed to teach beginners the basics of the HTML language in the easiest manner so they can get their web pages up within a day! The course includes concise examples, clear screen shots, and exercises to test the user's knowledge.">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="HTML, class, course, beginner's course, training, train, instruct, learn, basic html, tags, introduction, intro">

The above example tells search engines who the "author" of this document is, what the "description" of this document is, and what "keywords" are associated with this document. These are the 3 most common fields search engines use, and should be placed in any top-level HTML documents you have on your site.