The Meta Element[2] is a critical component of HTML[4] (Hyper Text Markup Language) that plays a significant role in the structure and content of a webpage. It offers information to search engines about the content of the webpage, helping them categorize pages and potentially affecting search engine optimization[1] (SEO). Meta elements can specify HTTP headers for content delivery, describe the page’s contents, and support ranking by search engines like Google[3]. They also include various attributes such as title, keywords, description, language, and robots, each serving a unique purpose. Despite their importance, the role of meta tags in SEO is not fully clear, and they can be manipulated, leading to penalties from search engines. Alternatives to Meta Elements exist, such as HTML elements like TITLE, ADDRESS, INS, DEL and HTML5’s Semantic web.
Meta elements are tags used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page.
They are part of a web page's head
section. Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head
elements and attributes.
The meta element has two uses: either to emulate the use of an HTTP response header field, or to embed additional metadata within the HTML document.
With HTML up to and including HTML 4.01 and XHTML, there were four valid attributes: content
, http-equiv
, name
and scheme
. Under HTML 5, charset
has been added and scheme
has been removed. http-equiv
is used to emulate an HTTP header, and name
to embed metadata. The value of the statement, in either case, is contained in the content
attribute, which is the only required attribute unless charset
is given. charset
is used to indicate the character set of the document, and is available in HTML5.
Such elements must be placed as tags in the head
section of an HTML or XHTML document.