Hypertext Skills Group

HEAD, TITLE and META tags

 
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd"
<HTML>


 <HEAD>

The first tag to be found after <HTML> is the <HEAD> tag and can be compared to the cover and first page of a book. Within the <HEAD> tag can be placed some further tags that tell the browser what the document is about.

The main ones you will see are:

  • <TITLE> </TITLE> and
  • <META> </META> 

  <TITLE>HEAD, TITLE
     and META tags</TITLE>

<TITLE> is what will be used by the browser to display at the top of the browser window and is akin to the title of a book or chapter. It is also what the browser will be using as a title for bookmarking that page. Many robot search engines use the title tag to add a web site to its index. As can be seen it is therefore important to use an appropriate title.

Meta Names are used to communicate information about the web page. There are several different meta names. We will discuss three of these here.

 

  <META NAME="Author"
     CONTENT="Joe Soap">

The author meta name is used to indicate who the author of the web page is.

 

  <META NAME="Description"
     CONTENT="The Naked Website">

The Description Meta name has an important use when it comes to some search engines. There are many search engines that will index your site automatically. Some of these search engines allow for a short description to be placed in their web page. If a search engine is looking in your web page for a Description Meta name, it will use this description in the index.

 

  <META NAME="Keywords"
     CONTENT="html,tutorial">

The Keyword Meta Name has another important use when it comes to some search engines. When these auto robot search engines index your site, some will look for a Keyword Meta Name to use as index words. When someone uses their search engine and searches on a word that is in your Keyword Meta Name list, your site will be included in the output search results. Each Keyword should be seperated by a comma.

These Keywords are not required in an html document, but should be used to help out the search engines or provide comments.

 
  
  </BODY>
   <P ALIGN=Center>
    <A HREF="contents.htm">

   </A>
  </P>

Contents 

 </BODY>
</HTML>