Search engines are used to find Web sites. They usually catalog sites by following links from page to page (known as spidering or crawling) and saving identification and classification information for each page. One way that search engines catalog pages is by reading the content in each page's meta elements, which specify information about a document.

Two important attributes of the meta element are name, which identifies the type of meta element, and content, which provides the information search engines use to catalog pages. Figure G.8 introduces the meta element.

Figure G.8. meta tags provide keywords and a description of a page.

Lines 1416 demonstrate a "keywords" meta element. The content attribute of such a meta element provides search engines with a list of words that describe a page. These words are compared with words in search requests. Thus, including meta elements and their content information can draw more viewers to your site.

Lines 1821 demonstrate a "description" meta element. The content attribute of such a meta element provides a three- to four-line description of a site, written in sentence form. Search engines also use this description to catalog your site and sometimes display this information as part of the search results.