What is a Meta tag

The meta tags are in the head section of an HTML document, i.e. in element. One is sent to the specific page to the browser, but it is not displayed, instead the source of the page is visible. There are different metadata schemas, developed partly by institutions or bodies (e.g. Dublin Core).

Very few of these metadata is interpreted by user agents (such as browsers and search bots). Compliance by the user is an agent, as the same depends on all HTML elements, the capabilities and configuration. Meta tags are designed to improve the searchability of the World Wide Web or a single web presence. Also one can record using meta tags, special instructions to control the bots of search engines.

Meta tags were once a secret weapon in order to be listed on a search engine. Meta Tags were abused for so long to give misleading slogans. Meanwhile, the search engines place more value on the actual text content of a website that performs the reader in the browser, and can largely ignore meta tags, or they are no longer included in the ranking of the page. On the web there are countless “meta tag generators”, which are working with mostly outdated or inflexible sets of meta-data and are therefore suitable only for a few applications.

Examples

The following meta tags are XHTML compliant. Be omitted for HTML 4, the forward slash (/) at the end.

Page description

A brief description or abstract of the contents of the website.

Tags

Name of the author and thus the content owner.

Instructions for bot

The robot is expected to start the site explicitly in the search engines index so that it is discoverable, and follow the links on the page. This statement is unnecessary in general, because it corresponds to the normal behavior of most web crawlers.

The robot is not the website to include in the index. The website should therefore not be found through search engines. See also: Robots Exclusion Standard.

The robot is allowed to start the site, but the links on the page will not follow. The effect is if the available links are on that page at all. The same effect can be achieved for individual links by pointing them to the attribute rel = “nofollow added.” (see nofollow)

The search engine will not be used on the results page, the text description of the Open Directory Project – if the page is entered there – but as with unregistered URLs show a section of the site itself (called “snippet”). This statement is supported by Google and MSN Search.

Meta tags as an alternative to HTTP headers

Meta tags can contain information that would normally be headers in the HTTP communication between server and client (e.g. a Web browser is transmitted). Originally it was thought that these data are read by the web server and implemented. This, however, in most cases is not the case and therefore it falls to the client to treat this information as HTTP headers.

The server-supplied HTTP header data can be made by a separate one. Ht access control file. Who were favored by the “browser wars” in the 90s – including some of those enforced meta tags that were never intended as an HTTP header.
Specify the MIME type (text / html) and the used character encoding (eg UTF-8) of the document. (see also Content-Type)

Indication of the language of the document.

Transmission by refresh

In order to route the call to a page to another URL (forwarding), this can be used as a refresh tag. The content parameters may continue for a time be set up, the customer, for example, refers to the user not the reason for the transfer:

It should be noted that this type of redirection is not understood by any browser or can be turned off by the user. It should therefore be a visible link to the user for transmission.