What Are Meta Tags?

Introduction

Meta tags are HTML tags that provide metadata about your website to search engines and web browsers. These tags help search engines understand what your website is about and provide additional information about your pages. By adding meta tags to your website, you can improve your website's SEO and visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).

In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at what meta tags are and the common ones you should add to your website.

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are snippets of code that are added to the head section of your website's HTML. They provide information about your website, including the title, description, and keywords. These tags are not visible to website visitors, but they play a crucial role in helping search engines understand what your website is about.

Common Meta Tags to Add to Your Website

Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important meta tags you should add to your website. It appears at the top of the browser window and provides a brief description of what the page is about. The title tag is also the text that appears as the clickable link in search engine results, making it essential for SEO. Your title tag should be between 50-60 characters and should include your primary keywords.

Description Tag

The meta description tag provides a brief summary of what the page is about. It appears underneath the title tag in search engine results pages and should be between 150-160 characters. The meta description tag is an opportunity to entice potential visitors to click through to your website, so it's essential to make it engaging and informative.

Keywords Tag

The keywords tag is a meta tag that lists the keywords or phrases that the page is targeting. Although search engines no longer place as much importance on this tag as they used to, it's still a good idea to include it. Use relevant keywords that describe your page's content and avoid keyword stuffing.

Robots Tag

The robots tag instructs search engine robots about what to do with the page. The most common values for the robots tag are "index" and "follow," which instruct search engines to index and follow the links on the page. You can also use the "noindex" and "nofollow" values to prevent search engines from indexing the page or following the links.

Open Graph & Twitter Tags

There are also a set of tags for Open Graph (og:) and Twitter (twitter:) these tags are particularly important to help make sure that your pages of your website show useful information and images across the web when they are displayed in preview cards. You can preview what your preview card will look like using our free tools, Preview Open Graph Card.

Review Tools for Meta Tags

Reviewing the consistency and accuracy of your meta tags is crucial to ensure that your pages are well defined and all of the information you wish to be visible through your titles and descriptions is present. If you have many pages on your website it can be a challenge to quickly review all of your key meta tags for every page. Tag Parrot has created a simple visual first approach to the review process by allowing you to view preview cards for every single page in one go.

Conclusion

Meta tags are an essential part of on-page SEO. By including meta tags on your website, you can help search engines understand what your website is about and improve your visibility in search engine results pages. The most common meta tags you should add to your website are the title tag, meta description tag, keywords tag and robots tag.