3. Metadata

Metadata is information that describes the content of a webpage. It is not typically visible to users, without looking at the code itself. But certain types of metadata may produce visible results.

Metadata is often included in the 'header' of a HTML webpage. Examples of metadata include

• Page titles
• Lists of keywords
• Descriptive text for media files included on the page
• The name of the page's author
• A brief description of the page's type and contents.

Web crawlers are able to read the metadata of pages and will often incorporate it into their summaries for the search engine index.

As an example, these are the meta tags of the page you are reading right now.