Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a web page's content and are used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a web page. They are part of a web page's head section and are not visible on the page itself, but only in the page's source code. Meta tags can be used to specify page description, keywords, and any other metadata not provided through other head elements and attributes. They play a crucial role in influencing how a website appears in search results and can impact click-through rate (CTR)
. There are different kinds of meta tags, but the most relevant ones for SEO are:
- Meta description
- Meta robots
- Meta viewport
- Twitter cards meta tags and Open Graph meta tags for content shared on social media
- Viewport Meta Tag to indicate how to render a page on a mobile
- Language meta-tags to indicate the content language of the page
- Notranslate meta tag to tell Google not to provide an automatic generated translation
- Nositelinkssearchbox meta-tag to not show the sitelinks search box
- Meta charset tag to define the character encoding of the website
- Meta refresh tag to send the user to a new URL after some time, usually from a redirection
- Author meta-tag to name the author of the page
- Copyright meta-tag to specify the owner of the rights to the source code of an HTML page
- Meta name rating tag to specify adult content
- Date meta-tags to indicate the date of the content
Meta tags are important for search engine optimization (SEO) as they help search engines understand what the content of a website relates to. They are used by search engines to index a page, and the information contained in them influences how a website appears in search results and can impact click- through rate (CTR)
