Meta Tags, Search Engine Crawlers, and SEO... oh my!
A meta tag is part of a site's HTML tag, it is used in the heading to describe the content which a web page contains. Meta tags help the search engine crawlers with indexing by providing information about a site.
Meta tags can include short snippets of what the page is about; they help search engine robots better index your site. Meta tags include the title tag, meta description, keywords used on the page, whether to index the page, and more.
These snippets do not appear on the page itself. Some of the tags, such as title tags and meta descriptions, will appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Meta Tags & Indexing Your Page
If you want your page not to be indexed, a noindex meta tag can help with that. Other meta tags, like keywords, meta descriptions and title tags, have negligible impact on search rankings.
It is still important to put effort into both the meta descriptions and title tags, because that can encourage yourhuman audience understand your page’s content and entice them to click, which means more traffic for you.
Creating SEO-Friendly Meta Tags
There are many types of meta tags, and they all serve a different purpose. Here are the common types of meta tags used, click on a topic to learn about them and how to create them:
- Meta description tag
- Title tag
- Robot attributes
- Index/noindex
- Follow/nofollow
- Keywords meta tag (not recommended)
- In 2009, Google said they no longer take into account keyword tags in its algorithm. You can still use them, but it is not recommended.