What is a HTML meta element?

About

A meta element is a html element added in the head section of a html document

It is used to add metadata to a web page e.g.:

• author,
• expiration date,
• a list of key words,
• default script used
• ….

and assign values to those properties.

It's one way to add web metadata markup to a web page along (RDF, Ld-json and other). See Metadata

Example

To define:

• the Author of a web page

<META name="Author" content="Dave Raggett">

• the publication date:

<meta name="pubdate" content="20100101">

Syntax

Each META element specifies a property/value pair where:

• the name attribute identifies the property (the key)
• and the content attribute specifies the property's value.

<META name="key" content="value">

Search Engine

Search engine are not always extracting/using all meta tag

For instance, the <meta> tags excluded by Google Search (Ref) include:

• robots
• description
• keywords
• revisit-after
• generator
• verify-v1
• googlebot
• google-site-verification
• mssmarttagspreventparsing
• no-cache

Documententation / Reference

• Meta Element Specification