If you are familiar with on-page SEO tactics, you’ve likely encountered meta tags before; these are snippets of text that are placed in a page’s HTML source code in order to describe that page’s content to search engines. These tags are typically placed in the <head> section of the code.
Title tags and meta descriptions are two common types of meta tags, though there are many other categories of meta tags for web devs to further optimize their site content. Below, we’ll discuss some of the most important meta tags to familiarize yourself with today, and the impact that meta tags can have on your website.
Title Tag: Arguably the most important type of meta tag, a title tag directly impacts what users see on the search results page. When you conduct a search, you’re greeted with a list of sites made up of two components: a clickable link, and a brief description of the page (known as a snippet). The text of that clickable link is the title tag, so it’s important to make sure that yours is descriptive, concise, and engaging. Web crawlers also use title tags to help them determine the content of your page, making it doubly important for your SEO efforts.
Meta Description: Unlike title tags, meta descriptions do not directly impact site rankings, according to Google. However, a meta description is sometimes used as the snippet on a search results page, if Google believes it provides a better description of a page than the on-page content itself. For that reason, it is still a vital meta tag to include, as it can indirectly impact SEO by influencing CTR.
Robots Meta Tag: This tag is how developers tell search engines how to handle their pages. There are a few different directives you can use, with the most well-known one being index/noindex, which tells search engines if you would like a page to be included in the search results. Another important rule is nosnippet, which can, in part, prevent your content from being used as input for Google’s AI Overviews. You can see a list of other rules here.
Canonical Tag: This tag helps web crawlers better understand which version of a page should be indexed. If you have near-duplicate pages of your site – perhaps for HTTP and HTTPS – a canonical tag will allow you to indicate which version of the page you would like to appear in search results.
Meta tags are a must for people looking to optimize organic performance. As discussed above, many meta tags have a direct impact on SEO performance, while others play more of an indirect role. You may want to prioritize different meta tags depending on your brand’s goals, so be sure to check in on your site’s source code regularly to ensure that your most important tags are present and up-to-date.
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