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What Are Meta Tags? What They Are & How to Use Them For SEO?

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Written By Martin Karus
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Approved By Martin Karus
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Published On 15th Jan, 2025
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What are meta tags? Meta tags are simply an HTML element which offers information about the given webpages to the search engines & the users.

meta tags

In simple words, a meta tags or meta description summarizes the page. However, search engines such as Google does showcases the descriptions and title in the following search results. By simply putting meta tags, one can influence how their website, page appears in the search results & attract more users to click through your website.

 

meta description

Now, we will move further and discuss each point thoroughly so that users can understand the concept of meta tags easily. But before that, if you are new to digital marketing and want to apply the best practices, you can get digital marketing services.

Which Meta Tags Are Supported by Google?

Google supports various meta tags, including:

Meta Name Tag Description  Example of Meta Tags
Page Description Short description shown in search results.

 

<meta name=”description” content=” Business tools for SEO, PPC, social media, etc.”>
Crawl and Index Control Controls page indexing and link following. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

 

Googlebot Specific Google-specific crawling control.

 

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

 

Prevent Translation:   Stops page translation in search results.

 

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”notranslate”>

 

Disable Text-to-Speech Prevents text-to-speech services.

 

<meta name=”google” content=”nopagereadaloud”>
No Sitelinks Search Box:

 

Prevents site links search box in results.

 

<meta name=”google” content=”nositelinkssearchbox”>
Site Verification Verifies ownership for Google Search Console.

 

<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”verification_code”>

 

Content Type & Charset: Specifies content type and character set.

 

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>

 

Redirect
 
Redirects after a set time (not ideal for SEO). <meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5; url=https://website.com”>

 

Explicit Content
Indicates explicit content. <meta name=”rating” content=”adult”>
Mobile Display Adjusts page display on mobile.

 

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″>

 

What Are Meta Tags? Understanding the Definition of Meta Tags

Meta tags are nothing but small codes of HTML. This code describes to search engines what your content is about, and meta tags are kept in the head section of the webpage and appear at the top. They are used to increase the visibility of the website, attract a larger audience, and improve search results and the user experience. It is also used for web crawlers because the crawler understands only these tags. The Meta tag are important if you want to improve your website visibility and search engine ranking.

Types of Meta Tags & Its Importance to SEO

Basically, there are mainly two important factors. One factor is user experience, and the second factor is visibility in search engine result pages. Let’s start with the first factor:

User experience: If you are getting wrong information from Google search engine, then you will not be happy with the information because it will not work for you, so these tags are important to improve user experience by applying few tags.

meta-title-and-description

  • Title Tags: What are Title tags? Important factor that indicates the topic of the webpage. This is one of the benefits of meta tags, to show the topic of a webpage.

title tag

 

description tags

  • Viewport Tags: The question of what is viewport tag is important as they are useful for mobile devices because they control the content of the webpage. They ensure the user gets a better experience and the content should be readable and accessible on all devices.

viewport tag

 

  • Charset Meta Tag: This meta tag is nothing but an HTML element that sets the character of the webpage. It ensures that the text is displayed correctly without any issues and does not provide a bad experience to users. This is another importance of meta tags because it offers a good experience to the user.

charset tag

  • Appearing on SERP: Basically, tags are very important for search engines because they give important information about the content of a webpage and its structure. The best part is that they make headlines clickable because they appear at the top of search results. So basically, these tags improve the website’s visibility, your credibility, the clicking ratio, and finally your online presence on the search engine result page.

What Are Some of the Benefits of Meta tags in SEO?

  • Regulating the way a website appears in search engine results. For example, the description tag enables you to give a simple summary of the page’s content, which can increase the listing’s attraction to people looking for exact information.
  • Allowing customization of social media and browsers. You can manage how a page’s content appears when it is bookmarked in a web browser or shared on social media by using tags like title and description.
  • Identifying a web page’s character encoding, which is crucial for guaranteeing that international characters and scripts display correctly.
  • The benefit of tags is giving mobile devices’ viewport settings, which helps guarantee that a website renders properly on smaller screens.
  • Giving different web services and apps access to machine-readable data about the relationships, content, and structure of a web page.

How to Use Meta Tags for SEO in a Proper Way?

These tags are a very crucial element for SEO point of view because they give important information about web page content. So, it is very important to know how to use them properly to increase your website ranking.

  1. Title Tag: This is a brief summary of the content of the page that is typically displayed in search engine results.
  2. Meta Description: A brief summary that highlights the significance and utility of the page for users.
  3. Keyword Tag: A list of relevant keywords that helps search engines understand the content of the page.

To improve search engine ranking and user experience, you need to know how to use tags properly and optimize them just by using the correct keywords.

Final Ending

In this content, we have discussed what are meta tags and how they are beneficial. All the basic details about these tags are explained so that you get proper knowledge about them. The definition of these tags is given so that you are aware of the concept before moving any further. We have also covered the importance of meta tags by looking from SEO point of view. Moreover, the use of these tags and what users will get are also mentioned.

Frequently Asked Questions: 

Ques 1. What are Meta Tags? 

Ans. Meta tags are HTML element which offers metadata about a webpage such as descriptions, keywords, instructions for the search engines.

Ques 2. What are meta tags important? 

Ans. Meta tags help search engines to understand & index content, affecting visibility in search results & user experience.

Ques 3. Can Meta Tags Improve SEO? 

Ans. Yes, the properly used meta tag such as description & keywords can simply improve search engine rankings & click-through rates.

Ques 4. Does Meta Tags affect website description? 

Ans. Apparently Not. Meta tag does not impact the website’s visual design but it does play a crucial role in the search engine services & optimization as well as content organization.

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