Meta tags are HTML tags that provide information to search engines about your page. The <head> section of an HTML document contains meta tags whose content only the metadata reader can see, not the user.
They help define page descriptions, indexing rules, viewport settings, and other parameters that influence how a page is processed by search engines and appears in search results.
Why Are Meta Tags Important for SEO?
Meta tags help SEO bots index a webpage in the search engine by communicating content and preferences. Meta tags can influence the way pages show in a search engine result and whether they are crawled or not.
Essential Meta Tags for SEO.
Meta Description.
Html CopyEdit.
- A descriptive summary of what the page contains max 160 characters in length
- A summary of the page, which is often shown in the search engine result snippet.
Meta Robots.
Html CopyEdit.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>.
Instruct search engines whether or not to index the page and whether or not to follow links on the page.
Meta Viewport.
Html CopyEdit.
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>.
Sets the scale of the page to make it mobile responsive.
Meta Refresh (Redirects).
Html CopyEdit.
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5;url=https://example.com”>.
Used to redirect pages automatically but is not good for SEO.
Common Misconceptions.
Meta Keywords are no longer relevant as Google and Bing do not use them for ranking.
The “Meta Title” term is wrong – It should be the <title> tag
Meta tags should be diversely used for SEO and not for forcing spam keywords.
