The head section of an HTML page provides background technical information about the webpage. It does not appear within the browser window (there is one exception, sorta). Though these elements do not physically appear, they are very important.
<head>
<title>The Title of Your Website</title>
<link>Typically a link to an external style sheet</link>
<style>internal style sheets go here</style>
<meta>various data is used here</meta>
<script>any javascript code goes here</script>
</head>
Again, these tags come in pairs. The closing tag must include the forward slash in front of the tag name.
Title- This appears in the web browser title bar way up at the top of the browser. Technically speaking this is the only item in the HEAD section that visibly appears in the browser. However, it does not appear in the actual browser window.
Required: No. If not used, the browser will display the name of the html file.
Recommended: YES! First, this tells your readers what that page is about. Second, search engines use this tag as the very first line of an individual search result.
Link – This tag links the web page to other resources behind the scenes. Important for external style sheets.
Required: No.
Recommended YES! If you are using CSS (and you should), then you will need to link to the external style sheet.
Style – this tag include style sheet information within the code of the actual web page itself. These are called internal style sheets. While this method is not recommended, sometimes it is necessary. Various kinds of CMS plugins will sometimes automatically create a mini internal style sheet.
Required: no.
Recommended: Depends. In general it is not needed since using external css files is best practice.
Meta – meta tags are used to define various information about the web page. Meta tags are defined by the name given to them. There are two essential kinds: description and robots. The details will be discussed in a following post.
Required: no.
Recommended: YES! A robots meta tag helps direct search engine spiders. A description tag is used by Google to be displayed in the search engine results. A well written description adds value to your search result.
Script – this is used for any javascript fucntionality on the webpage. For most people this is typically some kind of web analytics tracking code. More advanced developers use javascript to control various portions of their web page. If you “view source” on the Google home page, you will see a fair amount of script usage, even within the main body of the page.
Required: No.
Recommended: Should be limited. Javascript can slow down a website. It all depends on how well it is written.
I will detail the use of some of these tags in separate posts.
Find more information about learning HTML at our recommended HTML Tutorials page or in our HTML archives.
[tags]html, head, style, link, title, meta, script, tags, web[/tags]
About the Author
Paul Flyer loves to research the web and find resources and tools for building, maintaining and promoting websites. Based in Saint Louis, MO, he works in management and spends his free time sharpening his web development and copy writing skills. Feel free to contact Paul with any questions, comments or ideas. He is also available to help you with your own website.
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[...] Where do you put the title tag? Visit the post on creating HTML Head sections. [...]
Thanks a lot for your help.