Meta tags are information that you may see commonly across HTML or website content. This information is also referred to as metadata and while you may not see it on a page, as a website creator, you may know that this is essential for web indexing.
A website crawler will require these tags in order to understand the information that is presented on your page. These tags are responsible for displaying snippets about the content and for ranking your content as well.
How to start:
Most meta tags will include a base description of the content you are writing about as well as some keywords that you will want to index for. Meta tags are important for your content and as you begin to add tags, you can help to direct search engine crawlers. What is important is keeping these tags fairly concise. Adding too many instructions could de-rank your page.
The best tags to use:
Content-type: This declares your character set and it needs to be present on every page.
Title: A title tag is essential for SEO and directing search engine traffic.
Meta-description: This tag describes each page to searchers through SERP’s and although it doesn’t influence ranking, it will often determine if the user clicks your page.
Viewport tags: viewport tags are important for mobile search engine results. Specify the viewport and you can have a page that will scale on mobile results.
Title: A title tag is essential for SEO and directing search engine traffic.
Meta-description: This tag describes each page to searchers through SERP’s and although it doesn’t influence ranking, it will often determine if the user clicks your page.
Viewport tags: viewport tags are important for mobile search engine results. Specify the viewport and you can have a page that will scale on mobile results.
Other tags:
You could also consider utilizing social meta tags and robot meta tags. Adding in data from social media sites can be important to your results but it is not absolutely required. Adding a robot meta tag can be important for indexing but it can quickly lead to some confusing results when you add in specific tags for bots.
Geotags and language tags can also be important for Google but not so much for other search engine results.
Consider some of these important tags as you are working at optimizing your site. Although I can take time to optimize your page, making sure that you are using meta tags can be important to maximizing your page results.
This post was written by Kristian D’An. Kristian is the owner and SEO Specialist at Digital Marketing Company, a SEO company. Kristian has been optimizing websites successfully for over 7 years. He has helped his clients achieve the #1 position on Google in several different industries.