HTML Tutorial: Meta tags
Meta-information can be included in the <head> section of a document. “Meta” means “information about”.
This tutorial will go through some basic Meta elements that you can place on your website. The name attribute specifies the name, and typing your text in content as part of the same tag will specify your preferences for that element.
Character encoding
This is actually a rather important element. The character set of your web page is specified with a meta element. The default character set of most browsers is ISO-8859-1. However, most web pages use UTF-8 as their character set, unless writing in a language containing many special characters.
The following is the coding you should place in your <head> section.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Description
You may have noticed when searching for a website in a search engine, some of the results come up with very short descriptions, or better descriptions than others.
The following meta element takes care of the description of your website.
<meta name="description" content="Anna's personal website, with tutorials on HTML and CSS.">
Keywords
This element defines keywords for your web page. However, many search engines don’t use meta tags to define a search, as many people have been using them inappropriately.
<meta name="keywords" content="food, restaurants, prawns, seafood, Australia, gourmet">
Author
As you are the author of the document, you might want to specify that you are the author.
<meta name="author" content="Anna Smith">
Other Meta Elements
There are many other meta elements that exist that you may notice in some web pages and their coding. The ones above are the important and most common ones.
If you don’t understand a meta tag, chances are that it was meant for the designer of that page and not necessary for the viewer of the actual page.