The meta tags in a web page are text snippets. They are invisible to site visitors, but if they are handled appropriately, they can effectively boost SEO.
How meta tags affect SEO
Meta tags and heading tags are not always visible to site users. Nevertheless, these invisible pieces of code can have a significant impact on how a page looks, whether users decide to visit it, and how the page performs in search engine rankings. SEO professionals must have a good understanding of what they do, as well as how to best utilize them.
Meta tags
A web page’s meta tags are embedded in the source code of the page’s header, so site visitors cannot see them. (Unless, of course, the user views the source code.) As explained in Moz’s meta tag overview, there are at least 20 types of meta tags. It’s crucial to know some of them, but not all are worthwhile. There are four types of meta tags: keyword tags, meta descriptions, meta content types, and title tags.
Meta tags like author, generator, cache control, and refresh will not have much of an impact on the performance of your site, so a good SEO company will comfortably ignore them and focus on the important ones: meta content type, meta description, and title tag.
Meta description
In a meta description, the contents of a web page are described in a short paragraph of 160 characters. The meta description of a page does not influence its ranking in search engine results, but that does not mean it is not important to SEO. Throughout the years, Google has experimented with the length and significance of a meta description.
Meta descriptions sometimes appear beneath page titles and URLs in search results from Google, but this isn’t always the case.
Meta content type
This website contains a lot of text. Nevertheless, such information would not be displayed without a meta content-type tag. Adding a content type tag forces the browser to use a specific character set, which affects how text appears on the screen. Using it is like adding a song to your website. Like sheet music, web page text tells the browser what instrument to play it on based on the content type tag.
Title tag
There are some title tags that do not start with ‘meta’ in the code, yet they are still usually considered meta tags. No matter how you categorize them, title tags are extremely important to both users and search engines, as they tell both the page’s title and what the page is called, and are displayed in search engine results regardless of how you categorize them.
Rankings for search engines place title tags second only to page content as one of the most important on-page attributes. Title tags are inspected by search engine spiders when they crawl web pages. The position of a page is therefore heavily influenced by this.
In the era of SEO, title tags are of such importance that misuse of them will be harshly penalized. However, they can be a simple and fast way of maximizing on-page optimization.
Heading tags
A heading tag is similar to a meta tag, except visitors are always able to see it. Using keywords without resorting to keyword stuffing is key to writing them. Click here to learn more about heading tags.
