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HTML Tutorial: Meta Data

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In psychology, "metacognition" is thinking about thinking. In databases, "meta data" is data about the data. In HTML, meta data is data about the page.

The  name=  and  content=  Attributes

Meta data provides information for search engines. The name must be one of Examples: 

<meta name="description" content="An 11 by 17 page of HTML reference material.">
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, HTML tags, HTML attributes">
<meta name="robots" content="all">
<meta name="author" content="Martin Rinehart">

Note: <meta> has no end tag.

 name="description" 

Description is just what it says. Use it to describe for the page for the benefit of visually impaired people and search engines.

 name="keywords" 

Keywords are actually phrases, possibly as short as one word. This is your way of telling the search engine that your page could be of interest to someone searching for these phrases. They help placement in the search ranking. (On the other hand, how many sites also use these keywords? That hurts placement.)

 name="robots" 

Robots is information for search engine's web crawlers. Four content values are specified: "Index" specifies that you want this page listed in the engine's index. "All" means that you want the current page indexed and the pages to which the current page links should be visited. "Noindex and "nofollow" mean what they say.

Search engines are not malware. They will respect your preferences. They may, however, arrive at one of those pages you thought would be kept private by the "nofollow" specification because some other site links to those pages.

For better control, ask Google about the "robots.txt" file you can place in your root directory. And remember that "search engines are not malware" also suggests that malwares are not search engines. Malwares are hardly likely to respect your privacy wishes. There's ugly stuff crawling the web right now, looking for "nofollow" pages. 'Nuff said.

Your Turn

I don't actually remember this stuff. I just go to the HTML Poster and copy these from its source. You can do the same and then edit the content= attribute to values sensible for your own pages.

Ready to incorporate frames (for banners, navigation and content)?

Frames are great!