At the top of your document
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| The Explanation |
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The HTML Code |
The “Head” or Header of the web page
contains required and important information for the web browser to read
and render into a viewable page. Without the required tags, the
browser cannot render the page correctly and will result in a screen
full of garbage characters, or a blank page.
Tags containing important information tell search engine
spiders and robots critical information about your web page and web
site. These tags play a large part in ranking your web site among
thousands of other similar web sites.
Required tags are marked with *, all others are important tags.
HTML tags begin with an opening angle bracket < and a
closing angle bracket >. Both brackets are required to
identify to the browser HTML instructions, where the instruction
begins and ends. In addition most HTML tags have an opening tag
<Head> and a closing tag </Head>.
There are two more required tags remaining in the next section
of this tutorial before you can see a web page. The <Body>, the
</Body>, and the </HTML> tags.
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* <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
* <HTML>
* <head>
* <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="Robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW">
* <title>Web Page Building</title>
<META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1
"http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l gen true for
"http://www.armadilloweb.com" r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1)
"http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true for
"http://www.armadilloweb.com" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'>
<meta name="Description" content="Free tutorials on Web Page Building">
<meta name="Keywords" content="Armadillo Web Design, Site, Free, Free Bits and Pieces, World, Web, Development, ">
* </head> |
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| The Tags |
Why They Are Needed |
| * <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> |
The DOCTYPE tag instructs the browser
that this document is a HTML document and open to public view, it also
instructs the browser as to what HTML version to use in rendering the
contents, and where on the Internet the browser can find references to
the version of HTML. Important point to remember. If the
DOCTYPE is missing or incorrectly stated the browser will revert to the
lowest common rendering and you may lose important page content. |
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| <HTML> |
The HTML tag specifies that everything below this tag uses Hyper Text Markup Language. |
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| <META> |
The literal meaning - beyond the
usual. In a web document, information required to
cause a web document to display in a web browser the way you intend. |
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| <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> |
This tells the web server to send the
following information to the browser to render the page: This is a text
document in HTML format, and the Character Set to use when rendering
the document. The character set 8859-1 is the first set for Latin
characters and can continue to -15. |
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| <meta name="Robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW"> |
The Robots tag tells the search engine
spiders and robots how to index your web page. In this example the
robots are to index this page and follow all links on this page, and adding
the page and links to their database index. If this were a private page
you could use "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW". |
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| <title>Web Page Building</title> |
The Title tag is one of the important
tags within the HEAD of your document, this is displayed in the title
bar of your browser, is used for the title of your bookmarks
(favorites), and as the title of your web page in search engine
listings. |
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| <META http-equiv="PICS-Label"
content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html" l gen true for
"http://www.armadilloweb.com" r (cz 1 lz 1 nz 1 oz 1 vz 1)
"http://www.rsac.org/ratingsv01.html" l gen true for
"http://www.armadilloweb.com" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0))'> |
"PICS-Label" This is not
necessarily a required label, however if your visitors are using
Internet Explorer with Parental Controls set (Content Advisor) your web
site will not be displayed until you have the appropriate tag
describing the content of your web site. See below for a link. |
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| <meta name="Description" content="Free tutorials on Web Page Building"> |
The Description tag is a brief
description of the content and purpose of your web page. This appears
in the search engine listing for your web site and plays a large part
in where your web site is listed. |
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| <meta name="Keywords" content="Armadillo Web Design, Site, Free, Free Bits and Pieces, World, Web, Development, "> |
Keywords are words or phrases web
surfers might use to find web sites like yours, these keywords should
also be included in the content of your web page. Search engine robots
will rank your page according to the keywords and where they are placed
within the content of your page. |
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| </head> |
The closing tag for the HEAD. This is
required to tell the browser where the heading information ends and
where additional instructions and page content will begin. |
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| </HTML> |
The closing HTML tag is required and
tells the browser where all instructions and page content terminate.
Not shown in the sample above, this tab is the very last tag in the
document. |
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| "PICS-Label" |
Internet Content Rating Association |
