HTML <head> best practices [closed]

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/275631

  •  07-07-2019
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Question

There are <meta> tags and other things you can place in the <head> of your HTML document. What <meta> tags etc. and best practices do you make use of in your HTML document to make it more accessible, searchable, optimized etc.

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Solution

In my case:

  • Title (should do [Section Name - Site Name] for better SEO)
  • Meta tag for Content-type, description, and keywords
  • Link to stylesheet(s) (don't forget to specify the media="").
  • <script> tag that links to external javascript files.

All tags should follow the W3C's standard. The W3C site has a more technical and detailed section about the HTML <head> section.

OTHER TIPS

Do your users a favor and make their IE engine switch to Chrome one when Chrome Frame is installed :)

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

You'll want to put SCRIPT elements at the end of the page before the close of the BODY element. See http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#js_bottom for details.

Besides the usual doctype, title, etc, I will try and provide you with some things I have learned and implemented that might be of assistance to you.

Firstly, remember that the title, for best user experience should have the most relevant sub section first. This is because it is usually displayed in the title bar/tab list/bookmark name. Consider this page title...

Stack Overflow - HTML head best practices

becomes Stack Overflow... (munched to save room in tab bar/bookmark list)

Now if you had 5 Stackoverflow tabs open (as I often do :P) then how would the user know which one is which?

Also note with CSS the cascading nature... So the order of these will matter. Same with Javascript, any dependencies on other external sites must be allowed for. I put mine in the head and havn't noticed a performance decrease. I put them there because it to me looks more tidy and logical. Though some other people will recommend putting the <script src=""> links in just before </body> so the browser won't temporarily stall... Just use whatever works best for your site.

Also a Meta tag of 'rating' with 'general' let's Net Filtering software know your site is safe for viewers of all ages (as long as it is, of course!)

I also use..

<link rel="start" href="/" title="Home" />

to let the browser know where the home of my site is. And for any browser prefetching systems, though I believe these are yet to be implemented by browsers without assistance of plugins.

Also consider the 'next' and 'prev' <link rel=""> if your pages are in a sequence of sorts.

First, make sure the < !DOCTYPE is the verry first element of the document, i.e. no space, tab or corrupted BOM marker.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <!-- declare all page rendering and programmatic related tags -->
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
    <!-- Care about IE ? -->
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
    <!-- globalise scripting and styling content language  -->
    <meta name="Content-Type-Script" content="text/javascript" />
    <meta name="Content-Type-Style" content="text/css" />
    <!-- title tag is MANDATORY -->
    <title>Short and relevant, about 64 characters/spaces</title>
    <!-- declare all CACHE controll -->
    <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
    <meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days" />

    <!-- declare all content description tags -->
    <meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://www.gcf.org/v2.5" labels on "1994.11.05T08:15-0500" until "1995.12.31T23:59-0000" for "http://w3.org/PICS/Overview.html" ratings (suds 0.5 density 0 color/hue 1))'>
    <!-- language specific keywords -->
    <meta name="keywords" lang="en-us" content="vacation, Greece, sunshine" />
    <!-- For french example -->
    <meta name="keywords" lang="fr" content="vacances, Grèce, soleil" />
    <meta name="description" content="about 255 characters/spaces WORDS relevant to the content of the actual page" />
    <meta name="Abstract" content="about 96 characters/spaces PARAGRAPH describing the actual page content within your site" />

    <!-- declare all situationnal and external relativity related tags -->
    <link rel="DC.identifier" type="text/plain" href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt" />
    <link rel="start" href="/" title="Home" />
    <link rel="prev" href="../" title="Parent section" />

    <!-- declare all page rendering cascading style sheets in order of incidence -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="globaly-used.css" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="specificly-used.css" />
    <!-- declare all page rendering specific cascading style i.e. IE only, hacks etc -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="more-specificly-used.css" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="i-love-ie.css" />

    <!-- not relevent to subject, declare all javascripts AFTER css linking -->

</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

I didn't see this mentioned: the <base> tag, if specified, should be the first element in <head>. (The base URI of the document is assumed to be . before/if not specified.)

IMHO, the two most important child tags of <head> are <title> and the Content Type meta tag. Search engines actively look at <title>. Whereas the other meta tags are often ignored. As a multi-lingual web user - I cannot stress more the importance of adding the Content Type tag because without it, the browser needs to autodetect the character set of the web page and this operation is often flaky. The result ends up being that various characters are not rendered correctly to the user or sometimes none at all in the case of Japanese or Chinese.

Here is an snippet of some of the header code from a current project of mine:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Reports Blah Blah</title>
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" />
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
...
</head>

There is a related question here that may help add some light regarding the order of the tags.

Generally my pages include the following: 

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
    <title>...</title>
    <meta name="Description" ...>
    <meta name="Keywords" ...>
    <meta name="Copyright" ...>
    <meta name="Author" ...>
    <meta name="Language" ...>
    <style type="text/css" ...>

DocType is important to enforce strict rendering (No quirks mode) by the browser. You may want to use XHTML instead - as long as there is one there. I add Copyright and Author purely because I design and create the pages for other companies. Description is for SEO, and Language is for the browser (if it supports it).

I don't believe it makes to much of a difference which meta tag comes first, or whether the title should be above. What counts in most cases is that it exists on the page, and has the correct content.

As far as I'm aware, most search engines ignore any "keywords" or "description" meta tags, instead preferring to read the content of the document.

Getting the page title right however, is of extreme importance.

Title, meta tags for keywords, content-type (if not explicitly set by the web server), and any CSS to be applied to the page.

Declaring the CSS up front allows the browser to lay out the page more efficiently (see http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#css_top).

I would add an important note: if you're using IE's meta X-UA-Compatible tag to switch rendering modes for Interet Explorer, you must insert it as the first item in HEAD:

<head>
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />
  <title>Page title</title>
  ...etc
</head>

In addition to the answers above I use the Dublin Core initiative meta-tags.

They are very useful for actual content/papers etc.

<meta name="DC.abstract" content="Document abstract" />
<meta name="DC.audience" content="Target audience" />

etc.

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