HTML metadata
HTML <meta>
tags are used to provide information (metadata) about a Web page, metadata is not displayed on a Web page, but rather provide some indication to the browser, or provide additional information for search engines:
<head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>Is not a meta tag, but must be present on every web page</title> <meta name="keywords" content="keywords"> <meta name="description" content="Short description"> </head>
In our example, we used three elements of <meta>
: the first indicates to the browser the encoding of the HTML document, the other two meta tags are intended to provide information about the content of the web page for search engines. Next we will look at each of them learn more.
Note: <meta>
tags must be located in the <head>
element.
Encoding
The encoding tells the browser which character set is used on this web page. For example, pages can be written using encodings for Russian, English, Arabic, Chinese, and many other character sets.
To specify the encoding, use the <meta>
tag with the charset
attribute, which is recommended as the first element inside the <head>
:
<head> <meta charset="utf-8"> </head>
Note: UTF-8 is a universal encoding that supports most languages and characters.
keywords
Any site has a set of keywords and phrases on which search engines look for the right resources in the network. These are the words that should compose the keywords content.
The easiest way to find the right keywords for the current page is to determine by what words you would look for the material presented on it. This will be the right keywords.
Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="Meta tag, metadata, keywords, description">
Keywords are specified by a comma or a space and can be written in any register. It is recommended to specify no more than 10-15 key words or phrases.
Search engines are now more advanced and define the category to which the information belongs, the content of the Web page, and the keywords are relegated to the second plan or completely ignored.
description
The description value is used to briefly describe the content that is on the current page. The recommended maximum length of this description should not exceed 180 characters:
<meta name="description" content="Description of the content on this page">
A short description of the page can be used by the search engine on the search results page under the name of pages and URLs:
Also a short description is used on the sites of some social networks, when adding a link to a web page:
The following points should be taken into account when compiling a brief description:
- The description should specify exactly the information that reflects the content published on this page
- The description must be unique and should not be repeated for different pages
- Try to in the description page also include the necessary keywords that will be counted in the search queries
Note: A short description, located under the link on the search results page, is called a snippet.
<title> tag
The <title>
tag is part of the metadata and is used to specify the page title. The title of the page can be compared to the title of the chapter of the book, as it should tell users and search engines about the information presented on the page.
The headline should contain important keywords so that search engines can include your page in search results for specific queries. It can also help users decide whether to visit your site or not, as they will see the headline as the link text in the search results:
The <title>
tag is one of the most important tags on a page. Consider a small list of recommendations that you should follow to write an optimized header for search engines:
- The content of the
<title>
element must not exceed 70 characters, including spaces. - The most important keywords should be placed first in the header, i.e. search engines will determine the value of keywords by their priority in the header: the first will be considered the most important, the last least.
- It is better to use the vertical bar
to separate keywords or phrases. Punctuation, underscores, and other separator characters should not be used or used in cases where a keyword or phrase cannot be written without it.|
- Try to exclude from the header different speech particles (for example: and, if, but, then, etc.).
- You can include the name of a site or a company in the title if the name is part of the phrase keys or if it is a brand that sees, users will go to your site.
- Do not duplicate the text of the
<title>
tag, the header must be unique for each page of the site. - The title should be relevant for the page, it should describe what is currently presented on the page, for example it can be written as follows:
<title>Page Theme | keywords | company or site name</title> <!-- Or so --> <title>Keywords | About Us | company or site name</title>