Web Communications Glossary

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Meta Information

What is meta information?

How can I specify meta information about my Web pages?

What is meta information used for?

I just want to get my site going on the Search Engines.

What is Meta Information?

"Meta" information is "information about information".

For instance, a summary or abstract about a Web page or even about a whole Web site is a form of information about other information (about the Web page or the Web site, which itself is information).

How can I specify meta information about my Web pages?

Meta information is defined in your Web pages using META tags (in the Web page header). Here is an example of an HTML header including meta information in meta tags (this is the header for this very page):

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Web Communications Glossary - Meta Info</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Definition of Meta Information">
<META name="keywords" content="index, search, keyword, meta">
<META name="distribution" content="local">
</HEAD>

Three meta attributes are defined for this page: the description, keywords, and distribution. You could also create new meta attributes for your Web pages. For example, a travel agency might want to classify some Web pages by "destination" and "rating":
<META name="destination" content="Caribbean,Virgin,Islands"> <META name="rating" content="four star">

What is meta information used for?
There are two primary uses for meta information in Web pages:

It provides for a high-level summary of the information contained in the page. Any software which just wants to display a summary about a page need only retrieve the HTML header and display the meta information (Web browsers and other Web applications can request that a Web server return only the header of a given page, rather than the whole file, to conserve time and network bandwidth).
It provides well-defined attributes or categories about a page which can be readily compiled into indexes such as search engines.

At WebCom, meta information in your Web pages can be incorporated into local indexes of your WebCom Web pages.

If the Web page is to be included in a local index, set the distribution to "local".
If you'd like the Web page to be included in the WebCom index of customer pages, set the distribution to "webcom" (we will soon be compiling all pages with distribution set to "webcom" into a glimpse index of WebCom customer pages).
Note, you can distribute a Web page in more than one method. For example, to include a page in all of the above indexes, set the distribution to "local,webcom,global".

NOTE: Setting distribution to "global" or "webcom" will automatically cause your page to be listed in the appropriate index(es). However, to list it in a local index of your own, you'll need to use the WebCom Glimpse Indexing Facility to create your own index and the search form used to search it.
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