Web Design & Development

Meta Data

Meta Data Defined

Inside the <head> element is a meta element. The purpose of the meta element is to provide meta-information about the document. Here is how Webopedia describes a meta tag:

Meta tag: A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.

Most search engines, by my experience, will use the title, name and content attributes of the meta tag to index your pages. This is a big reason why they are important.

title tag

Based on who you ask a title tag may or may not be deemed a true meta tag. However it serves the same purpose generally. It is the only meta data though that is visible on a Web site (on the top of the page). It looks like this:

<title>meta Data Page</title>

Description and keyword tags

Search engines also might use the description and keywords you define in the meta data. The description is commonly what appears after a person does a search and it shows the results that match.

Here is a sample of what it might look like:

<meta name="description" content="Describes meta data and how it can be used">
<meta name="keywords" content="metatag, meta tag, metadata, meta data, meta element description">

Content type tag

The content type tag tells the Web browser what it should expect to find as content on the page. It looks something like this:

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/HTML; charset=ISO-2022-JP">

Hiding your page from search engines

One other meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag which lets you specify that a particular page should not be indexed by a search engine. It looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Note: you may also deter robots by using a robots.txt file which accomplishes the same thing. You can also start the name of your file or directory with a ~ or a period to hide it from robots.

Redirecting to another page

Redirecting to another page looks something like this:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.uvsc.edu/disted/">

The above will redirect a person from the page they are on to another page (in this case www.uvsc.edu/disted/) in the time period specified (in this case 0 seconds)

Some advice

Don't repeat the same word in your keywords or description. Search engines will look for repetition and throw you to the bottom of the list if you do it (since people do it in an attempt to increase their rating)
Different search engines use different criteria for placement. meta data plays a part, but so does number of users of your site/page, actual content on the page, number of people linking to you, etc.
Your title is important to many search engines. Keep it short though, some search engines will truncate after 150 characters or so. You also want to limit the size of your description.