C & G web - HTML's META-tag

HTML's META-tag

The META element is used within the HEAD element to embed document meta-information not defined by other HTML elements. The META element can be used to identify properties of a document (e.g., author, expiration date, a list of key words, etc.) and assign values to those properties.

HTML lets you specify metadata -- information about a document rather than document content -- in a variety of ways. The META element can be used to include name/value pairs describing properties of the document, such as author, expiry date, a list of key words etc. The META specification does not define a standard set of properties.

It is especially important when your index page has little or no user-oriented text, e.g.

when your site is frames-based and the index.html consists of little more than the FRAME tags.
when your page is entirely graphical and so there's no text for the search engines to index (except that some may index the text inside the ALT attributes in the IMG tag).

name This attribute identifies a property name. The specification does not list legal values for this attribute.

content This attribute specifies a property's value. The specification does not list legal values for this attribute.

http-equiv This attribute may be used in place of the name attribute. HTTP servers use this attribute to gather information for HTTP response message headers.

Each META element specifies a property/value pair. The name attribute identifies the property and the content attribute specifies the property's value.

For example, the following declaration sets a value for the Author property:

<META name = "Author" content = "Ashley Preston">

The lang attribute can be used with META to specify the language for the value of the content attribute. This enables speech synthesizers to apply language dependent pronunciation rules. In this example, the author's name is declared to be French:

<META name = "Author" lang = "fr" content = "Victor Hugo">

Note. When a property specified by a META element takes a value that is a URL some authors prefer to specify the meta data via the Link element. Thus, the following meta data declaration:

<META name = "DC.identifier" content = "ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1866.txt">

might also be written:

<LINK rel = "DC.identifier" type = "text/plain"
        href = "ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1866.txt">

NAME attributes

The NAME attribute specifies the property name while
the CONTENT attribute specifies the property value.

Some typical names are:- Author, Classification, Copyright, Description, Formatter, Generator, Keywords, Rating, Robots. For example:-

<META NAME = "generator" Content = "Mozilla 4.0">

is a tag that many HTML editors automatically insert into a user's HTML code. It can be used to identify the software used to generate the page.

META Tagging for Search Engines

It is possible for you to control how your page is indexed by using the META tag to specify additional keywords to index, and a short abstract. It will be very helpful to list the keywords in a META tag - for example, your site might be reasonably specified by several dozens of keywords - but you probably would not want them all on your home page. Here is an example:-

<HTML>
<HEAD>
    <TITLE>CERTIFICATE IN TELEMATICS (INTERMEDIATE) Unit 02 Developing web pages
    </TITLE>
    <META	NAME	= "Keywords" 
	CONTENT = "HTML, web, design, CSS, browsers, plugins,
	graphics, HTTP, course, Runshaw, tags, notepad,
	hypertext mark-up language">

    <META	NAME	= "Description"
	CONTENT="A resource for C & G Web Design students.">
</HEAD>

There is also a Robots META tag, to tell search engine robots if the present page may be indexed, and if the links may be followed.

META builder

Try a META builder page, and generate META tags for your own pages.

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