Meta Tags – What They Are and Why They’re Important for SEO
Meta tags are used to increase the visibility of a website on the search engines, making them incredibly important for search engine optimization. With that in mind, it’s also important to know how to use them correctly, otherwise they can negatively affect your SEO.
Let’s learn more about what meta tags are, why they matter to SEO in Louisiana and some popular examples.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are snippets of HTML code that can be crawled by the search engines to help them understand what the content is about. The search engines then determine the visibility of a web page using this information. Meta tags can only be seen in HTML code and are added to the <head> section of pages.
Why are Meta Tags Important to SEO?
The search engines are robots so it’s not possible to communicate with them in the same way we would a human. Therefore, we need code to get our message across, and meta tags are one such example.
Meta tags tell the search engines whether a page should be indexed or not. They also include valuable information about the content. Be sure to add meta tags to your blog posts and articles to ensure the bots can understand your content and rank it higher in the search results.
Examples of Meta Tags
Below is a list of the most commonly used meta tags and a brief description of each. Follow the best practices for each one as they are all slightly different.
- Meta descriptions. This brief description tells the search engines what your page is about. Search engines like Google typically display the meta description in the search results, improving click-through rates.
- Title tags. Title tags tell the search engines what the title of your web page is. It is distinct from the H1 of your page, so they both can be different from each other.
- Robots meta tag. This tag lets the search engines know if your page should be indexed or not indexed. Contact forms, privacy policies and internal search pages are typically not indexed.
- Viewport meta tag. Pages optimized for various devices must have a viewport tag in the head document. This tag gives instructions on how to control the page’s dimensions and scaling.
- Language meta tags. Language meta tags indicate what language the content should be shown in.
If you want to succeed with search engine optimization, it’s important that you know how to use meta tags correctly. You can find more information about meta tags in this HubSpot article. Or contact the SEO experts at WSI Star Web Solutions for more information!