HTML Meta

Examples

Document description
Information inside a meta element describes the document.

Document keywords
Information inside a meta element describes the document's keywords.

Redirect a user
This example demonstrates how to redirect a user if your site address has changed.

The Meta Element

As we explained in the previous chapter, the head element contains general information (meta-information) about a document.

HTML also includes a meta element that goes inside the head element. The purpose of the meta element is to provide meta-information about the document.

Most often the meta element is used to provide information that is relevant to browsers or search engines like describing the content of your document.

Note: W3C states that "Some user agents support the use of META to refresh the current page after a specified number of seconds, with the option of replacing it by a different URI. Authors should not use this technique to forward users to different pages, as this makes the page inaccessible to some users. Instead, automatic page forwarding should be done using server-side redirects" at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#adef-http-equiv.

Keywords for Search Engines

Some search engines on the WWW will use the name and content attributes of the meta tag to index your pages.

The intention of the name and content attributes is to describe the content of a page.

However, since too many webmasters have used meta tags for spamming, like repeating keywords to give pages a higher ranking, some search engines have stopped using them entirely.

You can read more about search engines in our Web Building Tutorial.

Unknown Meta Attributes

Sometimes you will see meta attributes that are unknown to you like this:

Then you just have to accept that this is something unique to the site or to the author of the site, and that it has probably no relevance to you.

You can see a complete list of the meta element attributes in our
Complete HTML 4.01 Tag Reference.

Jump to: Top of Page or HOME or Printer friendly page

Search W3Schools:

What Others Say About Us

Does the world know about us? Check out these places:

Dogpile Alta Vista MSN Google Excite Lycos Yahoo Ask Jeeves

We Help You For Free. You Can Help Us!

• Tell your newsgroup or mailing list
• Link to us from your pages
• Help us correct errors and broken links
• Help us with spelling and grammar
• Validate the XHTML code of this page

W3Schools is for training only. We do not warrant its correctness or its fitness for use. The risk of using it remains entirely with the user. While using this site, you agree to have read and accepted our terms of use and privacy policy.

Copyright 1999-2002 by Refsnes Data. All Rights Reserved

How we converted to XHTML