Core Lab: Interaction » Inserting Meta Information

Inserting Meta Information

Inserting Meta Information (provided by Doris Yee)

Meta tags go in the head of your HTML page. Basically, they identify your site, its contents, its author, and so forth to search engines and such.


<html>

     <head>
     <!--information about the page-->

     </head>

     <body>
     <!--information on the page-->
     </body>

</html>

Generally, you should put your meta tags under your title in the head of your HTML code.

The Title tag

Okay, almost all meta tags use the <meta name=""> format. Or, a more accurate way to look at it is, the title tag isn’t a meta tag at all. However, it serves a “meta” function, to a degree. Your title, which goes here:


<head>
   ...
   <title>My Site Title</title>
   ...
</head>

Meta Keywords

One meta tag is keywords. Here’s what a dummy meta keywords tag might look like:


<meta name="keywords"  content="keyword, another keyword, a key phrase">

Note that the selected key words, and phrases, are separated by commas and a space. How do you choose your keywords? Think of words and phrases that describe your Web site. Since this site is about Web design for beginners, I chose some words and phrases that describe my site. Hopefully, people who enter these words or phrases into Google or whatever will find my site.

Be very careful to avoid anything that might resemble “keyword stuffing,” or repeating and re-using the same words and phrases over and over again. While search engines used to ban sites for keyword stuffing and other abusive practices, they no longer take it as seriously. Still, it is anything but best practice, and may lead to problems for both you and your site.

And don’t put too much stock in keywords. Most modern search engines either ignore them entirely, or place little weight on them in ranking your site.

Meta Description

This is a brief (1-2 sentences) description of your site. It should reiterate the same keywords that are used in your other meta tag, again without “stuffing” the words by repeating them over and over again. This is most important because many search engines (not Google, sadly) use your description for your site when it pops up on their search results.


<meta name="description" content="Insert your description here!">

The Argument about Meta Tags

There is considerable dispute over how much meta tags help your site achieve high rankings (and therefore high traffic) on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and other search engines.

Back in the day (say, the late 1990s and early 2000s), meta tags were an indisputable necessity for any page to get noticed by search engines. But, the abuse of "search engine optimization" techniques by spammers and overenthusiastic designers led Google and other major search engine hosts to retool their algorithms and de-emphasize the importance of meta tags in getting your site noticed.

Charsets

Charsets, or character sets, are one of those things that you can set early and forget about — or you can not set them properly and have easily avoidable trials and tribulations as a result.

Here's some basic information about charsets. My first advice is to use this particular one in every design you make, unless you have a good reason not to do so:


<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Having said that, you should know that you will also run into this one quite often:


<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

So what the hell is the different? Charsets set the character encoding for a Web page. The charset ending in UTF-8 supports almost all the characters (letters, numbers, and symbols) you're ever likely to use in a Web page. It's based on Unicode, which is the computing industry's standard for transforming computer code gibberish into recognizable letters, numbers, and symbols. As for ISO-8859-1, it only recognizes 191 letters from a Latin-based script. It recognizes English-based letters and numbers, but not all of the punctuation symbols and other characters, especially ones used in foreign languages.

If you use ISO-8859-1, at some point you'll find that your browser doesn't recognize a punctuation mark or a symbol you've typed. And you might get angry e-mails from users asking why they can't read your work. So just avoid the controversy, use the UTF-8 charset, and move on to something more interesting.