Quoted from Wikipedia:
Meta elements are tags used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page. They are part of a web page’s head section. Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other elementshead and attributes.
The meta element has two uses: either to emulate the use of an HTTP response header field or to embed additional metadata within the HTML document.
With HTML up to and including HTML 4.01 and XHTML, there were four valid attributes: content, http-equiv, name and scheme. Under HTML 5 there are now five valid attributes, charset having been added. http-equiv is used to emulate an HTTP header, and toname embed metadata. The value of the statement, in either case, is contained in the attributecontent, which is the only required attribute unless ischarset given. charset is used to indicate the character set of the document, and is available in HTML5.
Such elements must be placed as tags in the sectionhead of an HTML or XHTML document.
More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element
In essence, the meta tags help indexation bots from Google, Bing, Yahoo know more about your website. Enabling them to better index your site under keywords that relate to your web site’s content.
Last Update: April 14, 2020
