HTML Meta Tags: Adding Metadata to a Web Page

Meta tags allow you to provide metadata about your HTML pages. This can be useful for search engines, browsers, and other applications trying to understand more about your page.

What is Metadata?

Metadata is information about, or that describes, other data or information.

If we relate this to a web page, if you think about it for a moment, you could probably come up with a lot more information about a web page than what you're actually displaying to the reader. For example, there could be a number of keywords that are related to the page. You could probably give the page a description. The page also has an author. All these could be examples of metadata.

Adding Meta Tags to Your Documents

You can add metadata to your web pages by placing <meta> tags between the <head></head> tags. The can include the following attributes:

AttributeDescription
nameMetadata name. The name specifies what aspect of metadata is being set.
contentSpecifies the property's value.
charsetSpecifies a character encoding declaration.
http-equivUsed for http response message headers. For example http-equiv can be used to refresh the page or to set a cookie. Values include content-type, expires, refresh and set-cookie.

Example HTML Code

Keywords:

Description:

Author:

Refresh the page every 10 seconds:

The above examples are some of the more common uses for the meta tag.