What are meta tags?
Meta tags are essentially just snippets of HTML code designed to do five basic things:
- Tell web browsers how to render your website
- Help search engines better understand what your web page or content is all about
- Tell web crawlers which pages on your website to index and which pages to skip
- Tell web crawlers how to index the pages on your website
- Tell search engines what page title and basic description you want them to display in search engine results pages (SERPs)
If you want a more in-depth understanding of this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: What are examples of meta tags?
Examples of meta tags include:
- Meta title – This tag tells Google and other search engines what title to display when a page on your website shows up in search. The goal is to keep it short, clear, compelling, and in line with the user’s search intent. Take note, however, that search engines do not always use a web page’s meta title in search even if it always provides them with additional context as to what your page or content is all about.
- Meta description – This tag, on the other hand, tells Google and other search engines what description should go with your meta title when a page on your website shows up in search. The goal is exactly the same as with the meta title. Also, just like the meta title, search engines do not always use a web page’s meta description in search.
In addition, it also helps search engines better make sense of what your page or content is all about.
3. Meta robots – This tag tells Google and other search engines which pages on your website to index—and which ones to skip—and how to index those pages.
4. Meta charset – This tag tells web browsers how the text content on your website should be rendered. Using the incorrect character encoding could lead to all sorts of rendering issues, including some characters being replaced by random symbols that do not make sense.
5. Meta viewport – This tag tells web browsers how to render the pages of your website on different devices by setting their visible areas.
Question #2: How do meta tags affect my website’s SEO?
Different meta tags affect your website’s SEO in different ways. Some do so directly while others do so indirectly.
Examples of meta tags that affect your website’s SEO directly include:
- Meta title – As we have seen earlier, the meta title helps provide search engines more context as to what your page or content is about. This, in turn, helps them show you to users who are more likely to find your content valuable.
- Meta description – The meta description functions pretty much in the exact same way as the meta title in terms of SEO. The only difference is that it is a bit longer so it can contain more information and keywords.
- Meta robots – As we have seen in the previous section, this tag tells web crawlers exactly how to index your website, which means it essentially explains the structure of your entire website (and content) to search engines
In addition, since the meta robots tag also tells web crawlers which pages to skip, you can also use it to keep them from indexing broken or unfinished pages that may cause search engines to flag your website for being broken and not show it in search.
Question #3: Is the meta tag ‘meta keywords’ still useful today?
No, the meta tag ‘meta keywords’ is no longer useful today. Google has stopped taking its contents into account when deciding which web pages show in search because the tag was particularly prone to abuse and was actually abused a lot back in the day.
Marketers used to not only stuff the meta keywords tag with keywords they wanted to rank for, but also popular but completely unrelated keywords just to drive more traffic to their websites.