The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Meta Elements
Article updated October 20th 2020
As a small business owner who has been advised by an SEO Agency or has read SEO tips on blog posts, you must have heard of the term meta tag and how they play an important role in your website's SEO. It is always unclear though how important these meta tags really are.
The SEO trends keep changing with the blink of an eye and hence it is imperative that we get our facts straight about the role of meta tags, in today's age.
This post will explain in plain language what a meta element was years ago, what it is today, how important it is and the various types of meta tag that will help the SEO future of your site.
Content Index:
- What Are Meta Tags
- Types Of Meta Tags
- Meta Description
- Meta Content Type
- Meta Robots
- Meta Title
- Meta Keyword
- Meta Author
- Meta Copyright
- Meta Language
- Miscellaneous Meta Tags
- How To Add Meta Tags To Your Site
What Are Meta Tags?
Tags in its literal meaning stands for a name or an identification mark given to an object. Ever since the internet came into existence, early websites implemented these identification marks in the form of textual tags enclosed within the element of the website's HTML code. These tag were known as meta tags and were also referred to as the meta element.
In simple words, meta tags are data that describe the content of the website and is one of the first information available to search engine robots to crawl, index and classify a given website. These tags are not visible to human visitors of your site, but the content is visible to the search engine bots. However, the content in two of the meta tags – title and description – is visible to humans on search engine results of a given website.
The most common syntax for HTML meta tag is as follows:
<head> <meta name=" " content=" "> <head>
Types Of Meta Tags
There are two broad categories of meta tags: Important and Optional.
Important Meta Tags:
These tags are important for a website. The SEO importance of these tags may have declined with time, but these are mandatory for every website as they give important information about the site to the search engines.
The following are the tags that are important meta tags:
- Meta Description
- Meta Content Type
- Meta Robots
Optional Meta Tags:
Some of these meta tags (e.g. meta keywords tag) were considered the most important tag to help identify the keyword category of a site on search. However, due to spammy usage of these tags, they have been deemed insignificant and shifted to the optional category. Some other tags are just optional because their existence or non-existence does not make much of a difference in how your content is interpreted by search engines bots.
The following are the tags that fall under optional meta tags:
- Meta Title
- Meta Keyword
- Meta Author
- Meta Copyright
- Meta Language (For Non-English Sites)
Now let's look at each meta tag individually.
Meta Description
The meta
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