The HTML Head Section - Home Of The Meta Tags - 2

Guest Author - Diane Cipollo

The second meta tag is the description meta tag. Search engines use this meta tag in a different way. When your webpage is added to the results page, the search engine will display the description from the description meta tag. However, this is not true for all search engines. The basic format is as follows.

<meta name="description" content="value">

<	left angle bracket
meta	element name
name	The name attribute controls the name or identification of this meta tag.
description	This is the value half of the name attribute/value pair. The "name" for this meta tag is description.
content	The content attribute controls what is read by the search engine. It tells the search engine to read the description between the quotation marks on the right side of the equal sign.
value	This is the value half of the content attribute/value pair. Your description that is between the quotation marks is read by the search engine.
>	right angle bracket

As you can see from the second table, the only difference between these two meta tags is the value given to the name attribute. In the keywords meta tag, the value was "keywords". In the description meta tag the value is "description". Also the content attribute behaves the same way in both meta tags. The information between the quotation marks on the right side of the equal sign is what is read by the search engine.

Now you need to write a brief description for your webpage. The place it between the quotation marks.

Note--The arrow

indicates that the code is wrapped to a second line and should really be all on one line.

← Back | Next →

|