meta element

Multiple Meta elements with different attributes are often used on the same page.

The specific purpose of each meta element is defined by its attributes.

In general, a meta element conveys hidden information about the document.

Meta elements provide information about a given Web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly.

See Meta element article for further discussion.

Meta elements of the form can be used as alternatives to HTTP headers.

In this example, the meta element identifies itself as containing the 'keywords' relevant to the document, Wikipedia and encyclopedia.

In the general form, a meta element specifies name and associated content attributes describing aspects of the HTML page.

Auto refreshing via a META element has been deprecated for more than ten years, and recognized as problematic before that.

Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other elements and attributes.

The toolbar detects phone numbers automatically, but a web site developer can override the detection algorithm using a Meta element and mark the valid numbers individually.

Meta elements are the HTML or XHTML element used to provide structured metadata about a Web page.

The meta element has two uses: either to emulate the use of an HTTP response header, or to embed additional metadata within the HTML document.

When a special meta element or its corresponding HTTP header is included in a web page, IE8 will render that page like IE7 would (strict mode).

Meta elements have significantly less effect on search engine results pages today than they did in the 1990s and their utility has decreased dramatically as search engine robots have become more sophisticated.

Yebol was designed to utilize a combination of patented meta elements and search algorithms paired with human-based computation to build a Web directory for each web search query.

Sites that expect IE7 quirks can disable IE8's breaking changes by including a meta element in the HEAD section of the HTML document.

This is due in part to the nearly infinite re-occurrence (keyword stuffing) of meta elements and/or to attempts by unscrupulous website placement consultants to manipulate (spamdexing) or otherwise circumvent search engine ranking algorithms.

In order to maintain backwards compatibility, sites can opt-into IE7-like handling of content by inserting a specially created meta element into the web page that triggers the "Compatibility mode" in the browser, using:

To avoid this situation, IE8 implements a form of version targeting whereby a page could be authored to a specific version of a browser using the declaration either as a meta element or in the HTTP headers.

This attack can be done even if JavaScript is disabled, using the "meta refresh" meta element, an HTML attribute used for page redirection that causes a reload of a specified new page after a given time interval.

In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a Web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines - and thus, high traffic to the website.