What are Meta tags? What are the main types that are important for SEO?

SEO Fundamentals

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Meta tags are essential HTML elements that provide information about a web page to search engines and website visitors. They play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO) by influencing how pages are indexed and displayed in search results. Understanding meta tags is vital for improving a site’s visibility and click-through rates. Several key types of meta tags are particularly important for SEO. The title tag defines the page’s title, while the meta description offers a summary that appears beneath the title in search results. Meta keywords (though less significant today) and viewport tags for responsive design also contribute to a page’s effectiveness. By optimizing these tags, webmasters can enhance their site’s performance and attract more organic traffic.

What are Meta Tags?

When it comes to SEO, meta tags are unavoidable. Meta tags describe the content of a web page by marking various information, which is very important for the website’s information architecture.

So, what are Meta Tags? Meta means “Metadata”, which is translated into Chinese as “metadata”, that is, “data that describes other data”; Meta Tags are called “meta tags”, which are tags used to describe web page data, and are generally written in HTML syntax. Therefore, the content of Meta Tags is typically not displayed directly on the website but will be written in the HTML part.

Why do we need to set Meta Tags? The reason is that search engine crawlers will give priority to reading HTML syntax content when reading web pages. If Meta Tags are set properly, crawlers can understand the information on the web page more clearly, which may improve SEO results.

What are the types of Meta Tags that are important for SEO?

After understanding the importance of Meta tags, we can learn more about the types of Meta tags that have the greatest impact on SEO. Generally speaking, there are seven categories:

  • Meta Title
  • Meta Description
  • Meta Charset
  • Canonical
  • Viewport
  • Robots
  • Hreflang

Meta Title – Key Meta tags to determine the theme of the web page

Meta Title, or web page title, is a Meta Tag used to determine the theme of a web page. It is an essential type of Meta tag. In addition to affecting crawlers in HTML syntax, Meta Titles will also be displayed in SERP and are a critical factor in determining whether users click on a web page.

Another thing to note is that the Meta Title is not directly equal to the article title, but the two are usually the same. After considering a good article title, you should confirm whether the Meta Title is set synchronously.

meta title

The format of the Meta Title is as follows:
<head><title>Webpage title</title></head>

Meta Description – a summary of the content of the web page

Meta Description is often discussed together with Meta Title. It is generally regarded as a featured summary of the web page content and, like Meta Title, will also be displayed in SERP.

meta descriptions

The format of Meta Description is as follows:
<head><meta name=”description” content=”Page content description”></head>Both Meta Title and Meta Description are important factors that affect user experience, so you should pay more attention to them when writing them.

Meta Charset – Character encoding

Charset is used to specify the character encoding used by the browser to display web page content. The character encoding used by mainstream web pages is UTF-8 . If the character encoding is not used correctly, garbled characters will appear when users browse the web, affecting the user experience.

meta charset

The format of Meta Charset is as follows:
<head><meta charset=”UTF-8″></head>

Canonical – Web Page Recognition

Canonical means “standard; authoritative” in Chinese. In the field of SEO, the Canonical Tag is used for page identification , which can help crawlers better distinguish pages with similar content.After setting this Meta Tag, it is equivalent to telling the crawler which of several similar pages is the most important web page content and displaying it in the relevant search results page to reduce the occurrence of penalties due to search engines misidentifying duplicate content.canonical
The format of the Canonical Tag is as follows:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”Webpage URL”/>

Viewport – Device Display

The function of Meta Viewport is to enable web pages to display the correct layout according to the device used by the user. Since search engine algorithms in recent years have paid more and more attention to the experience of mobile devices, properly setting the Meta Tag Viewport related to device display is an important part of achieving multi-terminal adaptation.viewport
The format of Meta Tag Viewport is as follows:
<head><meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″></head>

Robots – Deny Indexing

Generally, web pages that are not specially processed will be crawled by search engine crawlers and indexed later. However, if there are special pages that you do not want to be crawled by crawlers or displayed on the search results page (such as web pages under development, website backend, etc.), you can set Robots.txt or noindex syntax to inform crawlers that you do not want the page to be indexed.robots
The writing format is as follows:
<head><meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow></head>

Hreflang – Language Settings

If the web page is multilingual, you can set Hreflang Tag to tell the search engine so that users in different regions can obtain the corresponding language content.hreflang
The format of Hreflang Tag is as follows:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”Page URL” hreflang=”Language Code”>

Eliminated Meta Tag: Meta Keyword

After introducing seven relatively important Meta tags, let’s add one more Meta tag, which was very important in the past but has now been eliminated by the algorithm – Meta Keyword. Seeing its name, I believe everyone can associate it with keywords, and the importance of keywords to SEO is self-evident, so why is it eliminated?

Meta Keywords were one of the crucial references for search engine crawlers to refer to web pages for some time. However, because it was easy to set and did not affect the reading experience, Meta Keyword tags and some even maliciously inserted keywords were often abused later. Therefore, it was abandoned by Google after 2009. Thus, even if Meta Keywords are set now, it will not be of much help to the SEO of the web page.

Summarize

Today’s article is coming to an end here. I hope it can help you understand the Meta tags that cannot be ignored in SEO. I also hope that everyone can reasonably set Meta tags in subsequent events to achieve better SEO results.

In addition, to help you master the relevant knowledge of Google SEO more comprehensively, we have also prepared a detailed Google SEO operation guide.

Nextwinz is a digital marketing service company in Dhaka Bangladesh, owned by Yiluqihang China. We provide digital services worldwide & offer Website design, SEM (Google Ads), SEO, and SMM. Best 360° digital marketing company in Bangladesh.

 

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