What Is Meta Tagging?

Meta tags are "data" (information) about data.

Meta tag

Right!

Meta tags are "data" (information) about data.

The <meta> tag provides macro information describing an HTML page. Meta tags do not appear on web pages, but computers do process them.

Meta tags are usually used to accurately describe a web page, including descriptions, keywords, page authors, last modified events, and other macro information.

Meta tags can be used by browsers to determine how to display web page content or how to repeatedly load pages, keywords used as indexing in search engine services, or used by other third-party web services.

Meta tags are used on web pages

There are many types of meta tags, but only a few are useful. In fact, if a site doesn't use any meta tags at all, it will perform just as well as sites that use meta tags. However, there are benefits to using meta tags, especially when communicating with search engine spiders. Here are some categories of meta tags you may have encountered:

Abstract -Please use the description meta tag instead.

Author -Of course, you can put your name on everything you write. However, to avoid confusion, the best place to sign should be somewhere in the body.

Cache-Control -This tag was used to prevent users from seeing outdated content on the site. It's almost invisible now, it's useless. Note: If you don't want certain content to be snapped by search engines, you should use robots meta tags for this purpose.

Classification -Think about how keywords metatags are used by spam websites. The same is true. I have never seen such a random metatag.

Content-Language -The label is a bit problematic. It's not hard to let search engines determine the language of the page content. Or only if you need to separate a page in a different language from other pages, such as your content in multiple languages.

Content-Type -This tag is important. It can be used to specify the character set for the page, ensuring that you specify the same character set on all pages.

Copyright -Similar to the author meta tag, you should add copyright information to the body of the website.

Description -It is no longer used to measure search engine rankings, but is still often used to generate page summary information (which will be displayed below the corresponding entry on the search engine results page). Therefore, it is a powerful tool to attract potential visitors. Never underestimate the external display information of each page.

Designer -Like author and copyright, put it in the body of the website.

Distribution -If a page is only used for internal distribution, then it should not be indexed using the robots.txt file or the robots meta tag, so this tag is completely unnecessary.

Expires -If you have content that should not be crawled or indexed after a while, it may be a bit useful. For bloggers, it should never be used.

Generator -Only used when the page is automatically generated by the software, so we have no reason to use it manually.

GoogleBot -If you have some terrible needs to treat different spiders differently, use it.

Keywords -For a while, it was very useful. But because it was often abused by spam sites, it later became unaffected by rankings. It is still often used now. For some second-rate search engines, it may still be a starting point, but it will certainly not be of great benefit. If you choose to use it, please don't fill it out!

MSNBot -see googlebot meta tag.

Owner -see author meta tag.

PICS-Label -See rating meta-label.

Pragma -Tells the browser whether or not to cache the page is up to your site. However, I heard that most browsers don't support it.

Publisher -See generator meta tag.

Rating -Like many web standards, it would be great if used in practice. However, many sites that should use "adult" and "restricted" use it a lot. Don't worry, let the content of these sites express their rating.

Refresh -If you need to redirect from one page to another, use a 301 redirect. This meta tag is widely considered garbage.

Reply-To -See author meta tag.

Revisit-After -Even if there are some benefits to frequent search engine spider visits, they won't go more often just because you ask them to. This tag can only be used to reduce the frequency of access, not to increase it.

Robots -Although you can use robots.txt files to achieve directory-wide effects, robots meta tags can be useful when targeting specific pages. You can use it to tell search engines which pages should be indexed, whether they should be archived, whether links should follow, or even generate search result snippets.

Subject -Your title is sufficient. This meta tag is not needed.

Title -Again, your title is enough and better.

Unavailable-After -This is new and will be supported by Google. Everyone has a question why they don't use expires tags. In a sense, these two tags are twins, which is just as useless for bloggers.