Meta tags

[Shapeshifter]

I'm editing the HTML code of my website and I'm a bit confused. It looks like this:

Line 5   <meta name = "keywords" content = " blah.. 

Line 6   <meta name = "description" content = " blah

Line 7   <meta

Line 8   content = " blah...

Line 9   name = subject>

Line 10 <meta

Line 11 content = "Blah..

The contents of the paragraphs for lines 5,8 & 11 are the same, consisting of 2,338 characters and 318 words (too much I reckon). Whilst I understand keywords and description I do not understand the purpose of lines 8 & 11. Do they need to exist at all and, if so, do they require different text?

Please help, I'm pulling my hair out. 

[OBonio]

name="subject" meta tags are used by search engines. What's on line 12?

http://www.cpcug.org/user/houser/basicwebdesign/metatags .html

[Shapeshifter]

name = classification><LINK

[OBonio]

Again, this is used by some search engines :

http://www.html-reference.com/META_name_classification.h tm

Change it to what you want.

[OBonio]

Oh, and no, you don't need them at all. Your website will still work, just that some search engines might not index your site as well without them.

[Shapeshifter]

Thanks Obonio

[fo3nix]

it depends how accurate you want to be. would be good idea to have something like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

this tells the browser what character set is used (here, utf-8. you should be using this char set).

the rest as the others say are for the benefit of search engines. google and the like do pay attention, but its definitely not all they pay attention to.