Why does the browser need metadata about the page?

Question

Why does the browser need metadata about the page?

Answer

There exists different categorizations of metadata but most generally metadata is “data about data”. While the browser doesn’t need most metadata it does often use metadata to enhance the user experience in some way. Metadata not displayed on a page but behind the scenes it can be used by other software (web crawlers, search engines, browsers, etc.) to process, encode, extract or index all sorts of interesting information (geographic coordinates, calendar events, contact info, etc.). What’s more, businesses are often interested in using metadata to improve SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

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Does it make a difference whether metadata come before or after it?

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HTML is read by the browser from the top of the document to bottom of the document. Important data (language, characters, frameworks, etc.) is stored in the section and should be as close to the top of the document as possible so the browser knows how the page should be displayed.

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I just started to learn about HDML, it is very interesting stuff to learn. This is going to take a long time to learn, from what I can see is going on, there is a lot of cross references to learn. For example, after I learn about the elements reference, they are input, link, too many to mentions here.

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try bookmarking all the references. I know it feels really overwhelming! I found that putting everything in a smart bookmarking list can help a lot! and take your time learning and reading those things you bookmarked :wink:

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Meta tags allow the browser to display the HTML page correctly, and for search robots to correctly index and rank sites. Thus, using meta tags, webmaster reports metadata (that is, additional data that is not visible to the user) about each specific page of the site. That is why the use of meta tags for the site is so necessary. This data is only needed by crawlers https://sitechecker.pro/website-crawler/ of search engines. Users do not see them. They contain additional information that allows for automatic processing and systematization of the page in the general flow of information on the Internet.

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Is there a limit on the amount of metadata you should put inside the element?
Do some developers input metadata that’s unrelated to the web content to improve SEO?

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HTML typo error. :love_letter:

If the head contains info that is not displayed, then why in this exercise we included everything we wrote in the head?

Hello, do you have an example?

Hey Roy, Would you please include your input on how the metadata is used to improve the SEO within the head tag?

@mtf





Opinions vary on SEO, so far be it for me to pretend to be an authority. My number one vote is the TITLE. How closely it matches and describes the real nature of the page is a strong factor in deciding to index a page or not. As for how the other META elements might be employed is where the gray area begins since that is where most of the gaming takes place (assuming the title hasn’t been exploited or compromised).

Anyway, we don’t need my opinion added to the fray.

https://yoast.com/metadata-seo-head-section/

Explore Open Graph and others…

SERP

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Search engines can crawl a website and guess its general purpose based on these elements; metadata enables webmasters to tell search engines what a page’s title is , which says a lot about what search queries it may be relevant for. Metadata is used in similar fashion by social media platforms such as Facebook.
CheckMoz

  1. Is meta date more important for a search engine or say with a science paper is the content even looked at by a search engine? 2. If meta data is all that is used in a search engine can I include all of my science paper as part of the meta data? 3. Is there an order of preference, metadata, title, content or 4. can the search engine decide on its own how it will decide what to present you and 5. are there standards for search engines?
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I’m thinking the same thing. If you write irrelevant things inside the metadata, just to facilitate the search, doesn’t that ruin the search experience?

I wish I had seen this suggestion 2 weeks ago… I’ve read so much good stuff and it’s GONE! No bookmarks, I start today! :muscle:t3:

We didn’t. We put the opening AND the closing “head” tags before the “body” one.

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Very insightful, thank you.

SEO basically. In short, it affects page rankings in search engines, which leads to more clicks on a site, which could ultimately mean more $$$$$$$