{"id":452,"date":"2021-07-15T13:27:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-15T07:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpproonline.com\/?p=452"},"modified":"2026-02-26T10:46:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T10:46:15","slug":"chapter-33-meta-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digitalhubz.com\/blog\/chapter-33-meta-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 33: Meta Information"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Meta tags in HTML documents provide useful information about the document including a description, keywords,
author, dates of modifications and around 90 other fields. This topic covers the usage and purpose of these tags.<\/p>\n\n

<\/p>\n\n

Page Information<\/h2>\n\n

application-name<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Giving the name of the Web application that the page represents.<\/p>\n\n

<meta name=\"application-name\" content=\"OpenStreetMap\"><\/pre>\n\n
If it\u2019s not a Web application, the application-name meta tag must not be used.<\/p>\n\n
author<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
Set the author of the page:<\/p>\n\n
<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Your Name\">\n<\/pre>\n\n
Only one name can be given.<\/p>\n\n
description<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
Set the description of the page:<\/p>\n\n
<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Page Description\"><\/pre>\n\n
The description meta tag can be used by various search engines while indexing your web page for searching
purpose. Usually, the description contained within the meta tag is the short summary that shows up under the
page\/website’s main title in the search engine results. Google usually uses only the first 20-25 words of your
description.<\/p>\n\n
generator<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
<meta name=\"generator\" content=\"HTML Generator 1.42\"><\/pre>\n\n
Identifies one of the software packages used to generate the document. Only to be used for pages where the
markup is automatically generated.<\/p>\n\n
keywords<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
Set keywords for search engines (comma-separated):<\/p>\n\n
<meta name=\"keywords\" content=\"Keyword1, Keyword2\"><\/pre>\n\n
The keywords meta tag is sometimes used by search engines to know the search query which is relevant to your
web page.
As a rule of thumb, it is probably a good idea to not add too many words, as most search engines that use this meta
tag for indexing will only index the first ~20 words. Make sure that you put the most important keywords first.<\/p>\n\n
Character Encoding<\/h2>\n\n
The charset attribute specifies the character encoding for the HTML document and needs to be a valid characterGoalKicker.com \u2013 HTML5 Notes for Professionals 86
encoding (examples include windows<\/em>-1252, ISO-8859-2, Shift_JIS<\/em>, and UTF-8). UTF-8 (Unicode) is the most widely
used and should be used for any new project.<\/p>\n\n
Version = 5<\/p>\n\n
<meta charset=\"UTF-8\">\n<meta charset=\"ISO-8859-1\"><\/pre>\n\n
All browsers have always recognized the <meta<\/em><\/strong> charset<\/em>><\/em><\/strong> form, but if you for some reason need your page to be
valid HTML 4.01, you can use the following instead:<\/p>\n\n
<meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=UTF-8\">\n<meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=ISO-8859-1\">\n<\/pre>\n\n
See also the Encoding Standard<\/a>, to view all available character encoding labels that browsers recognize.<\/p>\n\n
Robots<\/h2>\n\n
The robots attribute, supported by several major search engines, controls whether search engine spiders are
allowed to index a page or not and whether they should follow links from a page or not.<\/p>\n\n
<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex\">\n<\/pre>\n\n
This example instructs all search engines to not show the page in search results. Other allowed values are:<\/p>\n\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Value\/Directive<\/strong><\/td>\nMeaning<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
all<\/em><\/td>\nDefault<\/strong>. Equivalent to index, follow. See note below.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
noindex<\/em><\/td>\nDo not index the page at all.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
nofollow<\/em><\/td>\nDo not follow the links on this page<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
follow<\/em><\/td>\nThe links on the page can be followed. See note below.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
none<\/em><\/td>\nEquivalent to noindex, nofollow.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
noarchive<\/em><\/td>\nDo not make a cached version of this page available in search results.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
nocache<\/em><\/td>\nSynonym of noarchive used by some bots such as Bing.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
nosnippet<\/em><\/td>\nDo not show a snippet of this page in search results.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
noodp<\/em><\/td>\nDo not use metadata of this page from the Open Directory project for titles or
snippets in search results.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
notranslate<\/em><\/td>\nDo not offer translations of this page in search results.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
noimageindex<\/em><\/td>\nDo not index images on this page.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
unavailable_after [RFC-850
date\/time]<\/em><\/td>\n		Do not show this page in search results after the specified date\/time. The
date\/time must be specified in the RFC 850 format.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/figure>\n\n
Note:<\/strong> Explicitly defining index and\/or follow, while valid values, is not necessary as pretty much all search engines
will assume they are allowed to do so if not explicitly prevented from doing so. Similar to how the robots.txt file
operates, search engines generally only look for things they are not allowed to do. Only stating things a search
engine isn’t allowed to do also prevents accidentally stating opposites (such as index, \u2026, noindex) which not all
search engines will treat in the same way.<\/p>\n\n
Social Media<\/h2>\n\n
Open Graph is a standard for metadata that extends the normal information contained within a site’s head
markup. This enables websites such as Facebook to display deeper and richer information about a website in a
structured format. This information is then automatically displayed when users share links to websites containing
OG metadata on Facebook.<\/p>\n\n
Facebook \/ Open Graph<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
<meta property=\"fb:app_id\" content=\"123456789\">\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/example.com\/page.html\">\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"website\">\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Content Title\">\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/example.com\/image.jpg\">\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Description Here\">\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Site Name\">\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\">\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"\">\n<!-- Facebook: https:\/\/developers.facebook.com\/docs\/sharing\/webmasters#markup -->\n<!-- Open Graph: http:\/\/ogp.me\/ -->\n<\/pre>\n\n