Meta tag is the most in-discussion tag in whole html world. Why is it so? What is Meta tag actually?
What benefit will it give you? I am trying to answer these questions from the point of view of a beginner. In any case it goes beyond that, please forgive me.
In simple terms metadata is the resume of a document. The <meta> tag contains information regarding the type of document, author, keywords, description etc.
Meta tag was actually created for giving these information to the search engine robots(these are software that index the content of websites and blogs) and web browsers.
The format of meta tag usually is : <meta name="author" content="James Anderson">
Most frequently used meta tags are these,{ I am writing them as if it is of this blog post and with a fictional author James Anderson (Name courtesy: Matrix movie)}
<meta name="author" content="James Anderson">
<meta name="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<meta name="description" content="This blog post helps you to understand meta tags better">
<meta name="keywords" content="html, meta, beginner">
Content-type says what the format of the document is. Author as denoted saves Name of author. Description gives a short description of the content of the file i.e., extract of the information available to the user. Keywords contain some words that best represent the document.
Schematically the above meta tag will look something like a profile page
You can add lots of meta tags even funny ones (though doesn’t make any sense to machines) like,
<meta name="my-mood" content="I am happy now">
Any way these are not helpful as search engine does not recognize them. Above that adding meta like these will reduce the page rank. I suggest you add only the ones which are relevant to your site.
Meta tags were used extensively in the earlier days. But some ambitious (crooked) webmasters tried to cram the meta with non-relevant keyword to get better ranking in the search results. Sometimes most of the keywords were not in the body of the document. This made the search engines to turn their thoughts a little to focus on the body of the document rather than the meta tag. Even so some search engines are said to be sticking to meta tags.
So I would suggest you to add some keyword and a small description to meta tag so that you will be ready in case any search engine look at it!!!
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