What is Meta Tag?
Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2024 6:47 am
Meta tags are a part of your website's HTML code that helps search engines understand more about your website and also affect how your website appears in search results.
Meta tags also tell browsers how to display your website on different devices. Simply put, browsers can make sure your website displays correctly for both desktop and mobile users.
And that tells Google that your site is mobile-friendly. This will help your site rank higher in Google search results.
I can say with full experience that meta tags are an extremely important part of SEO .
In this article, we’ll walk you through SEO basics and best practices for using meta tags to optimize your web pages, as well as learn how to get search engines to know about your pages and rank them higher.
Table of Contents
What is a Meta Tag?
What is a meta description?
What is Robot meta tag?
Optimize Robots Meta Tag for SEO
What is Viewport Meta Tag?
What is Title Tag?
Improve your meta tags today
What is a Meta Tag?
Meta tags provide information about a web page and directly affect how search engines view and display your website.
Let's look at an example of writing HTML code in the header of a page:
<html>
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”Knowing meta tags increases your chances of climbing the rankings on Google search pages. Rank higher, get more visitors, and create conversions as desired.”>
</html>
</head>
Meta tag elements act as a convenience for search engines like Google. The example above is setting up a meta description to tell Google about your web page, and Google will use this meta description to show it in search results for you.
Meta tags are also useful to your customers because they improve the user experience. For example, the viewport meta tag tells the browser to display a web page based on the screen size the user is using.
There are many different types of meta tags, but the most commonly used are:
Meta descriptions
Robot meta tags
Viewport meta tags
Also, title tags work like meta tags because they help Google understand what your page is about, just like meta descriptions. Google uses title tags to show your page in search results. Don't get them confused, though - technically, title tags are not meta tags.
What is a meta description?
Meta description is like a summary of the content of a web page for search engine crawlers and users themselves. It usually appears under the title in search engine search results page.
The code for the Meta description tag looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”We’ve compiled a list of the best running shoes for 2020, sorted by brand, category, and fit. You can find your own shoes. Let’s see what’s on the list.” />
How to adjust Meta description to be SEO friendly
Although Meta descriptions don’t have a huge impact on Google rankings, they are still snippets of information on Google search results pages that help reach searchers.
Think of Meta description not as a ranking factor but as a way to increase click-through rate (CTR). So always make sure to add creative, readable, easy to understand Meta description and include your target keywords to drive traffic. You can use SEO agency services here.
Try making your Meta description more clickable with these tips:
Write no more than 160 characters.
Write a summary of key points
Avoid duplicate meta descriptions across your website.
Write to the point, descriptively and concisely.
Write according to your search intent.
Include your target keywords naturally.
Try using an On-page SEO checker to help you optimize your rich people database meta tags and ensure they are SEO-friendly.
What is Robot meta tag?
Robot meta tags instruct search engines whether or not you want certain parts of your site to be crawled and indexed. The pages and links you create on your site will be indexed by search bots and web crawlers based on your preferences. This means that you can use robot meta tags to control Googlebot's indexing of your site.
The robot meta tag in the header of a web page looks like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
You can add this tag to Search Engine in content attribute.
Commonly used command tags include:
Index : This tells the indexing bot to index this page, so users can see it. If you don't add anything in the code, it will be displayed by default.
Noindex : This tells the search engine not to add this web page to its index. This means that the web page will not be displayed in the search results pages.
Follow : This directive allows search engines to follow links you place on your web pages and direct readers to other pages. If you don't add this directive to your source code, it will be displayed by default.
Nofollow : This tells Search Engine bots not to crawl links on that page, unless you approve of the link. Some websites use this as a security measure to tell Search Engines that they are not spamming.
Noarchive : This tells search engines not to cache or display the page.
If you’re using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins that can help. For example, if you want to edit Yoast’s advanced settings to set robots meta tags, other content management systems (CMS) like Squarespace and Wix have similar options.
Optimize Robots Meta Tag for SEO
The Robots Meta Tag limits how Google crawls the pages on your site.
For example, you might use the noindex directive when you don't want Google to index duplicate content because it's not SEO-friendly.
Or use the nofollow tag when you don't want Google to crawl the links on that page or if the page is a comments section and you don't want other people to tag links to their website to create backlinks, you can use this tag as well.
Meta tags also tell browsers how to display your website on different devices. Simply put, browsers can make sure your website displays correctly for both desktop and mobile users.
And that tells Google that your site is mobile-friendly. This will help your site rank higher in Google search results.
I can say with full experience that meta tags are an extremely important part of SEO .
In this article, we’ll walk you through SEO basics and best practices for using meta tags to optimize your web pages, as well as learn how to get search engines to know about your pages and rank them higher.
Table of Contents
What is a Meta Tag?
What is a meta description?
What is Robot meta tag?
Optimize Robots Meta Tag for SEO
What is Viewport Meta Tag?
What is Title Tag?
Improve your meta tags today
What is a Meta Tag?
Meta tags provide information about a web page and directly affect how search engines view and display your website.
Let's look at an example of writing HTML code in the header of a page:
<html>
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”Knowing meta tags increases your chances of climbing the rankings on Google search pages. Rank higher, get more visitors, and create conversions as desired.”>
</html>
</head>
Meta tag elements act as a convenience for search engines like Google. The example above is setting up a meta description to tell Google about your web page, and Google will use this meta description to show it in search results for you.
Meta tags are also useful to your customers because they improve the user experience. For example, the viewport meta tag tells the browser to display a web page based on the screen size the user is using.
There are many different types of meta tags, but the most commonly used are:
Meta descriptions
Robot meta tags
Viewport meta tags
Also, title tags work like meta tags because they help Google understand what your page is about, just like meta descriptions. Google uses title tags to show your page in search results. Don't get them confused, though - technically, title tags are not meta tags.
What is a meta description?
Meta description is like a summary of the content of a web page for search engine crawlers and users themselves. It usually appears under the title in search engine search results page.
The code for the Meta description tag looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”We’ve compiled a list of the best running shoes for 2020, sorted by brand, category, and fit. You can find your own shoes. Let’s see what’s on the list.” />
How to adjust Meta description to be SEO friendly
Although Meta descriptions don’t have a huge impact on Google rankings, they are still snippets of information on Google search results pages that help reach searchers.
Think of Meta description not as a ranking factor but as a way to increase click-through rate (CTR). So always make sure to add creative, readable, easy to understand Meta description and include your target keywords to drive traffic. You can use SEO agency services here.
Try making your Meta description more clickable with these tips:
Write no more than 160 characters.
Write a summary of key points
Avoid duplicate meta descriptions across your website.
Write to the point, descriptively and concisely.
Write according to your search intent.
Include your target keywords naturally.
Try using an On-page SEO checker to help you optimize your rich people database meta tags and ensure they are SEO-friendly.
What is Robot meta tag?
Robot meta tags instruct search engines whether or not you want certain parts of your site to be crawled and indexed. The pages and links you create on your site will be indexed by search bots and web crawlers based on your preferences. This means that you can use robot meta tags to control Googlebot's indexing of your site.
The robot meta tag in the header of a web page looks like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
You can add this tag to Search Engine in content attribute.
Commonly used command tags include:
Index : This tells the indexing bot to index this page, so users can see it. If you don't add anything in the code, it will be displayed by default.
Noindex : This tells the search engine not to add this web page to its index. This means that the web page will not be displayed in the search results pages.
Follow : This directive allows search engines to follow links you place on your web pages and direct readers to other pages. If you don't add this directive to your source code, it will be displayed by default.
Nofollow : This tells Search Engine bots not to crawl links on that page, unless you approve of the link. Some websites use this as a security measure to tell Search Engines that they are not spamming.
Noarchive : This tells search engines not to cache or display the page.
If you’re using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins that can help. For example, if you want to edit Yoast’s advanced settings to set robots meta tags, other content management systems (CMS) like Squarespace and Wix have similar options.
Optimize Robots Meta Tag for SEO
The Robots Meta Tag limits how Google crawls the pages on your site.
For example, you might use the noindex directive when you don't want Google to index duplicate content because it's not SEO-friendly.
Or use the nofollow tag when you don't want Google to crawl the links on that page or if the page is a comments section and you don't want other people to tag links to their website to create backlinks, you can use this tag as well.