Usage of Meta Tags for a Web Page

Meta Tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes. Let’s go step by step looking at an example below.

Let’s look at each of the attribute differently and the importance of that attribute. Firstly <> represents the closing of the tag. When a tag is opened it should be closed, else may result in an error. Then http-equiv=" ", META tags with an HTTP-EQUIV attribute are equivalent to HTTP headers. Typically, they control the action of browsers, and may be used to refine the information provided by the actual headers. Tags using this form should have an equivalent effect when specified as an HTTP header, and in some servers may be translated to actual HTTP headers automatically or by a pre-processing tool. On the whole the above example indicates that type of content within the document which is text/html.


Meta Tags of any web page can be found in any browser by going to View -> Page Source. Meta tags describe the content and the purpose of the webpage. Meta tags are very useful from the search engine point of view as it forms one of the criteria for ranking high in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and etc. The below is the example of the meta tag for Facebook.com,
Meta tags come under the header section of the web page, which starts with and ends with . Title is another critical attribute for the Meta tags. Title starts with the tag. A good title tag will be of 63 characters which can fit in any search engine results page correctly. If the title exceeds 63 characters we will see “…” with the characters that exceed 63. The title of a web page tells in short the content in that page. Deciding the title needs a good keyword research about the theme of the article.

What is “UTF-8”?
UTF-8 is defined by the Unicode Standard [UNICODE]. In UTF-8, characters range from the U+0000..U+10FFFF (the UTF-16 accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets. The only octet of a "sequence" of one has the higher-order bit set to 0, the remaining 7 bits being used to encode the character number. In a sequence of n octets, n>1, the initial octet has the n higher-order bits set to 1, followed by a bit set to 0. The remaining bit(s) of that octet contain bits from the number of the character to be encoded. The following octet(s) all have the higher-order bit set to 1 and the following bit set to 0, leaving 6 bits in each to contain bits from the character to be encoded. The syntax for the usage of utf-8 is

Why is “noodp and noydir” used?
The search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN use in some cases the title and abstract of the Open Directory Project (ODP) listing of a Web site for the title and/or description (also called snippet or abstract) in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To give webmasters the option to specify that the ODP content should not be used for listings of their website, Microsoft introduced in May 2006 the new "NOODP" value for the "robots" element of the meta tags. Yahoo also came out with the similar option later “Noydir” to opt out of the Yahoo directory. The syntax will be,
Meta Description and Keyword attribute:
The description attribute defines the description of a page. The idle description attribute can be 150 characters that can describe the web page in short. This is the description that also appears in the search engines results page which can be visible for the visitors who search for your website in the search engines. The similar is the keyword attribute. Writing the keyword attribute requires a good keyword research on the theme in which the web page is build. We can include a wide range of keywords in the meta keyword tag which can include synonyms. There is no maximum number of characters for the meta keyword attribute but excluding the irrelevant keyword would make the meta keyword attribute very specific to the content on the web page.