What are meta-tags?
Meta-tags are designed to hold information about the HTML page
itself. In contrast to the content of the page, which is about a
specific subject, meta-tags tell browsers, search engines and other
designers about the page itself; what the page is about, who wrote it,
how it should be displayed, etc.
Meta-tags are standard HTML tags, and should always appear in the
Head tag of the document. They take the form:
<meta name="tagname" content="information"> or
<meta http-equiv="headername" content="header value">
As you can see above, there are two types of meta-tag, but we should
only be concerned with the first one; the second allows web page
designers to send information to browsers as if it had come from the web
server itself. There is also one special meta-tag, the title tag, which
takes the form:
<title>the title of the page</title>
There is no limit to the number of meta-tags you can have on a page,
or on the types of information you can put in them, but practically,
there is no point in adding meta-tags to your page without a purpose.
Search engines will only read five or six meta-tags at the most, so you
should try to limit your meta-tags to these.
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