You may have seen these in the head section of an HTML document, well meta tags are used to notify information and specify details related to the content of an HTML page together with it’s specially defined metadata. Meta-Tags are not visible on the website actually, as these are mostly read by web crawlers to analyze an HTML page. Format of defining Meta-Tags depends on the type of Meta-Tag you want to use. Most commonly used Meta-Tags consists of 2 attributes ‘name’ & ‘content’ like shown below:
<meta name="Name of Meta-Tag" content="Content of Meta-Tag"/>
Use of various Meta-Tags play an important role in search engine optimization of a website. It’s impact on a website ranking evaluation gives these tags a high importance & makes Meta-Tags an element which every website should have. Some specific Meta-Tags also help in order to control a few aspects of web crawlers behavior.
Advantages of Meta-Tags
An HTML file head section can accommodate many elements that can be used for essential information such as the page title, page description, and charset definition etc. Like ‘keyword’ Meta-Tag can be used to define keywords which are relevant for HTML page content or to specify a topic for the page. Similarly, ‘author’ and ‘copyright’ Meta-Tags can be used to define publisher related details.
However, not all Meta-Tags are used for providing details to web crawlers, there are some Meta-Tags which manipulate the behavior of web browsers & crawlers while analyzing HTML pages like preventing a page from being indexed or by preventing crawlers from following outgoing links. To explore more in detail, please read ‘Types of Meta-Tags’ which will be more helpful for you to understand various Meta-Tags & their specific usage.
Thank you so much Nuke. It pretty much cleared my concept of Meta tags. Keep it up!