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Meta Tags | What Are Meta Tags? How Important Are They?

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Meta tags are bits of text that describe the content on a page. You won’t be able to see all the meta tags on a page, unless you check the pages coding. The tags are important as they tell search engines what the page is about.

Meta tags only exist in HTML form, the term ”Meta” stands for ”metadata” which is part of the data that meta tags provide.

How important are they?

Metadata can help your SEO, but there are different types of meta tags. If you want to see the different types of tags on a page, you can right click, then press ‘view page source’.

The different types of Meta Tags:

  • Meta description: This is a brief description about the page, it explains to search engines and users searching for the webpage on a search engine, what the page is about. Google has said that you don’t have to include keywords within meta descriptions, but a well thought out description may entice searches to click through to your site. Therefore, including a keyword may show searches that they will find what they’re looking for, if they click on your page. They should be no longer than 120 characters.
  • Meta keywords: Keywords are words that you seem relevant to a page that users will search for. As briefly explained above, Google says you no longer need to cram in keywords as this isn’t part of their ranking algorithm.
  • Meta robots: These are what search engine crawlers (Robots or bots) use to know what they should do with a page.  ”index/noindex” tells search engines whether to show your page in results or not. ”follow/nofollow” tells search engines whether they should trust links on your page, that determines whether they ”follow” the link to the next page.
  • Title tags: Search engines view this text as the title of your page, and it appears at the top of your browser. Title tags have the biggest impact on your SEO and search engines ranking compared to other tags. These are the only ‘tags’ that are visible to the user/searcher. They should be no longer than 60 characters.

Would you like us to assess your meta tags to see if they are missing or need to be improved? Get in touch here.