Meta Tags are HTML tags that describe the web page’s content for search engines. They are highly utilized in most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies and are considered an important part in attaining SEO success. These tags do not influence your page ranking, as Google and other search engines have stated that they do not consider meta tags in the search engine rankings. Relevance, high quality content, user satisfaction and popularity are what is important to Google more so than meta tags.
Meta tags are, however, still useful because they provide search engines with information about their websites. They help to describe your page in a readable format, allowing the search engine robots to validate the tags’ relativity to your site’s content. Using these tags can be beneficial in enabling search engines to interpret your page’s content more effectively to ensure keyword consistency.
A useful tip to remember is to not be too excessive when creating your Meta Tags. Avoid keyword stuffing as this can negatively affect your search engine rankings. Be wary of spam and “spammy” descriptions, as search engines have been very vigilant against signs of manipulation
Here are some examples of the most commonly used Meta Tags:
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Title
<title>The Title of the Page</title>
While this is not necessarily a meta tag, it does work similarly as one. This is the title text that appears in the search engine listing.
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Description
<meta name=”description” content=”A description of the page” />
This tag provides a succinct description or summary of the page.
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Robots
<meta name=”robots” content=”…, …” />
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”…, …” />
These particular meta tags can control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing. The robots tag applies to all search engines, while the “googlebot” one is specific to Google.
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Meta Content Type
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”…; charset=…” />
<meta charset=”…” >
This tag defines the page’s content type and character set.
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