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The <meta> tag also known as meta data provides additional information about your web page, for example, keywords, author information, language type, description and much more. The <meta> tag is also used to embed information about your web page that most search engines use to index and categorize your web page. The information within the <meta> tags may be used by servers and browsers as well.

The purpose of the author <meta> tag is to indicate who created the web page by providing one of the following formats which include the author’s full name, email address, company name or URL address in the <meta> tag. The most common format is to provide the author’s full name or company with an email address, but it’s not recommended to include the email address due to spamming. The author <meta> tag is not supported by the major search engines but it is still considered a <meta> tag standard.

The copyright <meta> tag is not the best way to copyright protect your web page. It’s more of a way to state that your web page has been, trademarked, copyrighted, patented or anything pertaining to your intellectual property.

What if you do not want browsers to save copies of your web page or web pages also known as caching, in order to stop browsers from caching your web pages you will need to use the <meta> tag along with the http-equiv attribute with the value of pragma. You will then need to use the required content attribute with the value of no-cache in order for this to work.

What if your web page has information that is updated every 2 minutes or so from your database or from other sources, for example, stock quotes, news and so on, well you can refresh your web page by using the refresh <meta> tag.

Now what if you move your web page to a new location and your users are not aware of the change, well you can redirect your users to another URL where you moved the web page to by using the refresh <meta> tag. Yeah, I know I already explained the refresh <meta> tag but there is still more to it as I will explain. We will still need the same ingredients from the refresh <meta> tag from the "How To Refresh Your Web Pages Using The <meta> Tag" tutorial but with one extra secret ingredient that we will add to the content attribute.

What if you don’t want your web page framed inside another framed web page. This is where the window-target <meta> tag comes into play.

Okay, what if you don’t want search engines indexing your web pages for some reason. This is why the robots <meta> tag was created to stop search engine spiders also known as robots, which are automated mechanisms that spider your site to list in the search engines.

You can also tell search engine spiders when to come back to your web site and re-index your web pages. In order to accomplish this you will need to use the revisit-after <meta> tag. One more thing you should know before I explain the revisit-after <meta> tag is that major search engines are thought not to support the revisit-after <meta> tag, but it never hurts to include the revisit-after <meta> tag anyway.

One thing you should know is that it is always a good idea to define your character encodings for every one of your web pages. Character encodings are the way that a languages alphabet, numbers, glyphs and so on are translated by your computer into bits, each one of your characters will be translated into bits, this is known as character encoding.

Web page transitions are basically how the web page changes when a user clicks a link or presses the back button to another web page or web site. When some one enters your web page or web site the http-equiv values page-enter or site-enter takes affect. And when some one leaves your web page or web site the http-equiv values page-exit or site-exit take affect.

Just like there is a rating system for video games and movies there is also a rating system for your web pages or web site, this is known as the PICS-Label <meta> tag. PICS is short for Platform for Internet Content Selection. The PICS-Label <meta> tag is considered a standard by the W3C.