What is a meta tag example? Meta tags are unquestionably crucial for SEO because they may be utilized to improve a website’s visibility on search engines. On the contrary, if written incorrectly, they can have a detrimental impact on the SEO ranking of your website. Let’s learn what meta tags are, why they are important for SEO, and how to use them effectively to gain from them.
What exactly are Meta Tags?
In the document’s HTML, meta tags offer data about the webpage. Although it is not visible on the page itself, this information is known as “metadata,” and search engines and web crawlers may read it.
Metadata from meta tags are used by search engines like Google to understand more knowledge about a webpage. They may employ this data to highlight snippets in search results and for ranking purposes, and they occasionally have the option to disregard meta tags.
The <title> and <description> components are two examples of meta tags.
How to Begin Using Meta Tags?
For better or worse, meta tags are where most SEO training starts. We debated how best to approach this subject because we frequently hear negative remarks regarding meta tags, namely the keywords meta tag. Because meta tags reside at the beginning of each page in the header and are thus the first thing people see, they are one of the first things that are examined in any site assessment. But before we go too gloomy, let’s remember that some of the best tools in a search marketer’s toolbox are meta tags.
Even while description and keywords are the two most frequently used meta tags, there are others. The most popular among the good, the bad, and the indifferent have been divided. As we go on to the awful ones, you’ll see that the list grows larger. There are a lot more meta tags available than you were able to cover here, so if you want to learn about them all, you should visit a thorough meta tag site.
The relevant meta tags
These are the meta tags that ought to be present on every page, without exception. You’ll see that there aren’t many items on this list; if you can get by with only these, though, that would be very appreciated.
Each page should have the meta content-type element, which is required to provide the page’s character set. If you omit this, it can affect how your page appears in the browser.
Below are a few alternatives, however, your web designer should know which ones are appropriate for your website.
- <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
- <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″>
Title: The title tag is in the header and, despite not beginning with “meta,” it carries data that is relevant to SEO. Every page should have a distinct title tag that describes the page.
Meta description: The infamous meta description tag serves one main function: It informs searchers about the page as they scroll through the SERPs. Even though this tag has no bearing on ranking, it is nonetheless quite significant.
Viewport: You need to identify the viewport in this mobile world. The Google PageSpeed Insights Tool will inform you more about it, but failing to do so could result in a subpar mobile experience. The typical tag is:
<meta name=viewport content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>
The impartial meta tags
In some cases, different sites will need to employ these, but if you can avoid it, do so.
Social media meta tags: Were’ omitting these. Although not strictly necessary, OpenGraph and Twitter data are significant for sharing.
Robots: One such myth is the idea that you must have a robots’ meta tag. Let’s be clear: If you don’t specify a meta robots tag, they interpret it as an index, follow for indexing, and link following.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
Language: Only if you are relocating overseas and need to identify the primary language used on the website should you use this tag.
Keywords: Yes, we classified this as “indifferent.” While a skilled SEO will never advise focusing on this tag, there is a very slim chance it might somehow benefit you.
Refresh: If at all necessary, avoid using this subpar redirect because it is. Use a server-side 301 redirect at all times.
Geo: As per the most recent information, Bing but not Google support these meta tags. Placename, position (latitude and longitude), and region are the three categories.
- <META NAME=”geo.position” CONTENT=”latitude; longitude”>
- <META NAME=”geo.placename” CONTENT=”Place Name”>
- <META NAME=”geo.region” CONTENT=”Country Subdivision Code”>
Negative meta tags
Use of these won’t harm your website in any way, let me be clear about that. However, Google itself believes that they are a waste of space.
Author of a website: This tag is used to identify the page’s author. Simply said, it doesn’t belong on the page.
Come back later: This meta tag instructs the robots to visit a page again after a specified amount of time. No significant search engine uses it.
Copyright: Look in your website’s footer. That Google article and we disagree somewhat on this. In some manner, we assume it says “Copyright 20xx.”
An abstract: This tag is typically used by educational endeavors and occasionally used to place a content abstract.
Conclusion
In SEO, meta tags are crucial. Even though it is now widely acknowledged that the meta description tag has no direct bearing on the search ranking, the title tag still has a significant impact on the Google search results page. The “keywords tag” is one useless meta tag, though.
