What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but only in the page's source code. Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.
The only difference between tags you can see and tags you can't see is location: meta tags only exist in HTML, usually at the "head" of the page, and so are only visible to search engines.
The "meta" stands for "metadata", which is the kind of data these tags provide - data about the data on your page.
There are two important type of meta that developers can use:
Google webmasters
How much time should I spend on meta tags, and which ones matter?
Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites.
Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. Meta tags are added to the <head> section of your HTML page.
Information and examples
The following table gives you an explanation of each of the meta tags used in this tool.
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Meta title Required |
This tag is often used together with the "description". The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results. |
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Meta description Required |
This tag provides a short description of the page. This description is often used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results. |
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Keywords |
This tag provide a list of primary keywords of the page content. Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. |
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Author and Copyright |
These meta offer the possibility tospecify who has created a web page and who owns the copyright of the content |
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Robots |
These meta tags can control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing.
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