What is the purpose of

Question

I saw that many web developers include in tag

<meta itemprop="name" content=" ">
<meta itemprop="description" content=" ">
<meta itemprop="image" content=" ">

I don't understand what is the purpose of this meta tags

Answer 1

It may be for schema.org micro-formatting which is meant to increase SEO.

"Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo!"

You can read the documentation here : https://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Answer 2

As Jeff Powers mentioned these are similar to the title tag and the meta description tag in the head of page and are recommendations from scheme.org (https://schema.org/docs/gs.html).

In particular these tags are utilized by Google+ (http://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123). They are used to provide richer information to social networks when sharing such as more specific titles, descriptions, and thumbnails. Depending on the page's target audience you may also want to look into including the microformats for Twitter and Facebook to better facilitate sharing on those networks as well.