What is the HEAD Element For?

by ladykathleen on May 4, 2012


At the tip of many HTML papers there are elements that don’t arrangement on web pages (for the many part). These elements are dark from readers though they are really useful to your web pages and shouldn’t be left out unless we have a good reason to.

Technically, there is usually one add-on that is compulsory to be during the tip of all HTML documents: the . This compulsory (in HTML 4.01) component is usually current within the , that is usually current within the .

In other words, the initial few lines of all current HTML 4.01 papers should demeanour like this:


html
  head
    title

You can also embody a above the HTML element. Like this:


!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"
html
  head
    title Your Title Here /title
  /head
  body .... the rest of your HTML request /body
/html

The TITLE Element

You should on your web page. As we pronounced above, it is compulsory in HTML 4.01, though there are dual other good reasons to do it, such as:

  1. Search engines use the TITLE as the primary means of cataloging sites. If your web page doesn’t have a detailed pretension the hunt engines will give it a reduce ranking than other pages. This is also what displays as the couple calm in hunt engine results.
  2. It displays during the tip of the browser window or in the tab, describing the page in the browser.
  3. It is what is created when someone bookmarks your site. If people bookmark your site, we wish them to remember it was your site and not “untitled”.

The HTML and HEAD Elements

As we mentioned above, both of these elements are compulsory since of the TITLE element. They conclude your request and yield a plcae for dark information, like META tags that can urge your site’s station in hunt engines.

Meta Information or Meta Data

is information contained in the HEAD of your HTML request to yield additional information about your web page. You can embody information like the author’s name, the module that was used to emanate the page, the date the page should expire, and, maybe many importantly, and for hunt engines.

But the many critical META add-on we should embody on your web papers is the impression set, or charset. This is critical for the . In HTML 4.01, we would write:


meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

And in HTML5 we would write:


meta charset="utf-8"

The impression set should always be the initial line in your HEAD so that hackers can't mangle in.

Learn More About Meta Tags

Meta tags are really critical to get good ranking in hunt engines. But if we usually have time to write possibly a good, detailed pretension or meta tags, . The pretension of your request will go serve for hunt engine chain than meta tags.

  • — use meta tags to get improved hunt engine placement
  • — go over keywords and descriptions to get the many out of your meta data
  • — additional links for meta add-on help

The Top of Your Document

The tip of your HTML papers with all the above information, will demeanour like this:


html
  head
    meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"
    titleWrite a Descriptive Title Here/title
    meta name="description" content="a brief outline of the calm of the website regulating keywords found in the pretension and your meta keywords"
    meta name="keywords" content="keywords that report your site; use the same ones in your pretension and description"
/head

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