C & G web - Meta Tags

Meta Tags

Meta stands for meta-information, meaning information about information. Meta information can be used to give a site indexing program useful information about an HTML document. Because it is a way of giving information to a server, it can also be used to create slide-show effects like the one at the beginning of this module.

Keep a record of your activities in this module and keep copies of all the HTML you create for use in the exercise form at the end of the module.

Learning Objectives

To introduce the <META> tag and its various uses.
To enable learners to make their website more accessible.
To show users how to create slide show effects.

What are Meta Tags used for?

Meta tags are used in three general ways:

1. Site Indexing.

Search spiders are programs that look through websites and index the pages within it. Some of these spiders look for meta tags when they index a site and use the information provided to categorise the site. In other specialist situations the information can be used by your server to track and maintain the document. This generally applies to specific intranet uses.

2. Client-pull.

The <META> tag allow you to insert HTTP header information. This information can essentially be a command to the server that will cause something to happen automatically.

3. Site filtering.

Meta tags can also be used with ratings services to identify the sex and violence level of your content and screen out inappropriate viewers.

Meta Tag Structure

The tag <META> tells the browser that the contents of the tag are a particular type of data.

The <META> tag must be placed in the HEAD of the HTML page like this:


<HTML>
<HEAD>

<META NAME="author" CONTENT="your name">
<TITLE>Untitled</TITLE>

</HEAD>
<BODY>

</BODY>
</HTML>

Meta tags come in two types that use two different attributes:

1. The NAME attribute - used for storing information.
2. The HTTP-EQUIV attribute - used for server interaction.

They have very different uses so let's look at them one at a time.

The NAME attribute

The NAME attribute assigns a name to the meta tag. A second attribute, CONTENT, defines the meta-information itself. For example:

This meta tag specifies that the favourite dinosaur of the author is a stegosaurus. There are a number of pre-defined values for the NAME attribute that many search engines understand. The most common of these are DESCRIPTION, AUTHOR, and KEYWORDS.

Before examing how the NAME attribute is used to help web searching, let's look more closely at how search engines work.

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