Part 6: Add Your Own Meta Tags

There are lots of other meta tags you can use beyond just refresh, keywords, and description. For example, you could use the Dublin Core Metadata package and add the following meta tags to your documents:

• DC.title
  The title of your Web page.

  <meta name="DC.title" value"About Web Design / HTML" />

• DC.creator
  The name of the person who created the page originally.

  <meta name="DC.creator" value"Jennifer Kyrnin" />

• DC.creator.vCard.EMAIL.internet
  The email address of the page creator.

  <meta name="DC.creator.vCard.EMAIL.internet" value"webdesign.guide@about.com" />

• DC.subject
  Similar to keywords, the subjects the page covers.

  <meta name="DC.subject" value"Web design, HTML, XML" />

• DC.description.abstract
  Similar to the description, a short overview of the page.

  <meta name="DC.description.abstract" value"Learn all you need to know about Web Design, HTML and XML." />

• DC.publisher
  The name of the publisher of the page.

  <meta name="DC.publisher" value"About.com" />

• DC.date
  The date the page was first published.

  <meta name="DC.date" value"1997-10-27" />

• DC.date.modified
  The date the page was last modified.

  <meta name="DC.date.modified" value"2007-02-21" />

Some other meta tags that are useful for Web pages are:

• author
  The Author of the page.

  <meta name="author" value="Jennifer Kyrnin" />

• copyright
  The copyright statement for the page.

  <meta name="copyright" value="Copyright 1997-2007 Jennifer Kyrnin and About.com" />

• robots
  Tells search engine spiders if they should or should not index the page.

  <meta name="robots" value="index,follow" />

You can also set some browser information with the "http-equiv" type meta tag:

• charset
  Set the character set for the page.

  <meta http-equiv="charset" value="utf-8" />

• expires
  Defines when the page should be reloaded - this is for caching browsers and servers.

  <meta http-equiv="expires" value="2007-12-31" />