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:
- description
- keywords
- revisit-after
- generator
- verify-v1
- google-site-verification
- mssmarttagspreventparsing
- no-cache