What is 'Meta Information'?
'Meta Information' or 'Meta Tags' are small pieces of information that can be tagged to certain files or elements to provide additional information. 'Meta Tags' are used in many files with media and web making particular use of them for providing descriptions or items, alternate text and other details about the file or webpage.
These 'meta tags' are normally defined by the type, or descriptor, and the value. For a music file for example a 'Meta Tag' would be the artist, the album name, the actual track name and track number. Each of these items would be a different 'Meta Tag' type and a value can be assigned to each. When a media player program goes to open the file, it will read these tags to tell you what the name or the track is and so forth.
For a webpage, the meta tags can include the page title, page description, keywords and author with the meta tags even extending to titles and alternate descriptions for images on webpages.
One example of a 'Meta Tag' being used on a webpage is on a link. If you place your mouse over a link and a small box appears with a title for the link, then the 'title' meta tag for the link was completed and thus, the name appears when the mouse pauses momentarily over the link. If this tag was not completed, the hover title simply would not appear.
There are certain meta tags that are mandatory for certain website files, such as the 'alt' tag for an image on a webpage. This is required because the 'alt' tag, short for alternate text, is the text that is displayed if the image you are inserting cannot be found. This will then put the 'alt' text in place of the image. On the other side of this is of course the fact that a title tag for a link is completely optional but is about improving the user experience for a website. After all, if you can visit a site that has tags on all links, you can get the title of that page before even clicking and may realise it is the wrong page and doesn't contain the information that you require.
Meta information is a key factor when conducting an S.E.O. review on your website. Visit our search engine optimization section for more information and how SEO can help to drive traffic to your website and increase visitors.
