Step by Step HTML5

20 Chapter 2
Note Not all search engines refer to tags. Google does not, for example; it indexes
only the text contained in the area. Because of the potential for abuse of the system,
such as Web developers packing their pages with unrelated keywords, fewer and fewer search
engines these days are using them.
For example, suppose The Garden Company’s Web site would be useful to people who
are searching for information about all types of gardening problems, such as pests,
weeds, and fungus, and about growing flowers and vegetables. Perhaps all these topics
are not mentioned on the main page, but you want people who search for those words
to be directed to the main page anyway. You could place the following in the
section:
Notice that the tag in the above code is a single-sided tag that contains two
attributes: name and content. The values for each of those arguments follow the equals
sign and are contained in double quotation marks.
Note If you are coding in XHTML, you would add a space and a slash (/) at the end of a
tag because it is a one-sided (self-closing) tag. This is not necessary in HTML.
The tag can also be used to redirect visitors to another page. For example, suppose
you told everyone the address of your Web site, and then you needed to move it to
another URL. You could place a “We’ve Moved” page at the original address and use the
tag to redirect users to the new address after five seconds, like this:
Here’s yet another common use: the tag can specify a character encoding
scheme. This is not a big issue if you are coding only in English (or in a language like
English that uses a Roman character set), but it is considered a tidy coding practice to
include anyway. If you want, you can add to the section
of your document to explicitly spell out that your page is in English.
In this exercise, you will add a page title and some keywords to the index.htm page you
created in the preceding exercise.