What is Meta Tags?
Meta tags are HTML elements placed in the <head> section of a webpage that provide metadata about the page. For SEO, particularly important are: The title tag (appears as clickable headline in search results), meta description (description text below the title), meta robots (controls indexing and link following), canonical tag (defines the original version for duplicate content), and Open Graph tags (for social media previews). Although meta keywords are ignored by Google, title and description remain crucial for click-through rate and indirectly for rankings. Each page should have unique, keyword-optimized meta tags.
Key Points
- Title tag: 50-60 characters, main keyword at the beginning
- Meta description: 150-160 characters, include call-to-action
- Each page needs unique meta tags
- Canonical tag prevents duplicate content issues
- Meta robots: control index/noindex, follow/nofollow
- Open Graph for better social media previews
Practical Example
“After optimizing meta tags, click-through rate increased from 2.1% to 4.8%.”