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Once upon a time, many eons ago when the Internet was just a small number of cardboard boxes attached to each other with string, meta tags were the town criers of the internet… erm… town.

 

Meta tags don’t do anything to the content that is presented in the browser window, but they are used by the likes of search engines to catalogue information about the web page.

There is one meta tag which can be used as many times as you desire and can contain the attributes content (required), http-equiv and name.

The content attribute is the meta data itself, which is linked to the name or http-equiv attribute.

The name attribute can be anything you like. Commonly used names include author, keywords and description. description meta data is often used by search engines (such as Google) to display a description of a web page in its search results, and as such this is perhaps the most useful application of the meta tag.

The http-equiv attribute can be used instead of the name attribute and will make an HTTP header, which is information sent to the server where the web page is held. The content attribute can be content-type, expires, refresh (how often the page automatically refreshes - very bad for accessibility), or set-cookie.


<html>

<head>

	<title>Title</title>

	<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
	<meta name=“description” content=“This is my bloody exciting web page about air conditioners” />

	…

The reason why meta tags used to be so important was because they were relied on by search engines to build a profile of a web page. The keywords meta data was used extensively for example. Nowadays however, most search engines use the actual content of the page itself, rendering most meta data useless beyond conveying information to someone who is physically reading the HTML.

Filed Under: HTML, HTML Intermediate, HTML Tutorials, Quick Tips, Web Design 
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