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Step 10 : Miscellaneous

Here is some more useful information. Although inserting meta tags and adding comments in your file is not absolutely nescessary, its good practise to include them in your HTML document.



Meta Tags

MetaTags are what a lot of search engines use to add your page to their databases. They identify what your page is about and if you want your page to show up more actively in searches then you must have detailed meta tags. The meta tags are included within the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

The two main types of meta tags are <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="content"> and <META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="content">

Lets take a look at the description META tag. It contains a brief introduction of your site which is placed within the content field of this tag.

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="This is a tutorial page 
which gives detailed information on how to create your homepage.">

This description will be included when a search engine shows the results to a user which influnces whether he visits your site or not.

Now for the Keywords META tag..
This tag contains a list of all keywords relevant to your site. If your site is about yourself then the keywords can be personal, homepage, biodata, photos, family, about, me, myself and so on.

Here's an example of keywords we could use for this tutorial.

<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="tutorial, free, members, HTML, 
homepage, tags, examples, learn, javscripts">

Note that the keywords are seperated by commas. Some browsers support keywords seperated by just spaces.

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Avoid Overlapping Tags

Most HTML tags occour in begin-end pairs. These pairs are in the form

<tag>  ...  </tag>

where the indicates the beginning of a tag-pair, and the indicates the end. Also multiple tags can be used together.
But the thing to watch out for is that the two or more different start-end pairs do not get tangled up or overlap. For example..

The following pairs of tags overlap..

<start tag1><start tag2>  ...  </end tag1></end tag2>
<B><U>  ...  </B></U>

The correct order would be

<start tag1><start tag2>  ...  </end tag2></end tag1>
<B><U>  ...  </U></B>

The innermost pair has to has to be closed before the next outer tag can be closed. This is also called nesting of tags as the tags are nested within each other.

Another common and avoidable mistake is forgetting to put the end tag altogether. This would result in unpredictable results on your HTML page.

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Commenting Your Files

Commenting files means to put remarks and comments in your HTML code just for your reference. These comments will have no affect on your HTML page. But it will help you to sort out your and mark parts of your code. It is ideal for lengthy and complicated pieces of HTML markup.

Comments are placed within the <!-- and --> tags.

<!-- This is a comment -->
<!-- And so is this one -->

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Additional Online References

There are loads of sites on the net teaching you to create HTML pages. Here are some of them to get you started.

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Reference Books

The following books are available at the Rediff Bookshop

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