frontpage vs dreamweaver - What is a meta-tag?

Hi again Vicki :)

A META tag is an HTML tag which provides information about a web document. Unlike regular tags, meta tags do not provide formatting information for the browser. Instead they provide such information as the author, date of creation or latest update for the page, and keywords which indicate the subject matter.

META tags must sit between your HEAD tags at the top of your file.

The most common META tags are Keywords and Description. Sometimes you'll see the Description value in search engines, the same way you see the Title tag.

Search engines often use keywords from meta tags to index their databases, but it's becoming increasingly common for them to give very little weight to META tags when it comes to natural search engine results, as it's very easy to 'stuff' the keywords with any term you want. The page content still needs to be relevant.

To insert META tags in Dreamweaver, make sure your cursor is in the Design view of your screen (not Code view, if you've got it turned on) and choose Insert > Head Tag.

By the way, if you're considering Dreamweaver training, we cover META tags on our Dreamweaver Intermediate course.

Hope this helps. If this answers your question, please mark this question as 'resolved' by using the button below.

Rich