Meta content is vital to web sites as this is a primary tool that search engines use to gather results. If your site is attached to a Content Management System (CMS), then there's a good chance much of the configuration needed has been done. Make sure that the meta tags on your website are unique for each and every page and try to make them as attractive as possible. Both a relevant title tag and the description tag will have to persuade a visitor to click on the link in the search results.

 

Meta content examples

  • page title
  • keywords
  • page description
  • alt parameters within <img> tags for images

The Most Important Meta Tags for SEO

Meta Title

This is the page title that Google and most other search engines show in search results. Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.

Meta Description

The meta description summarizes the page’s content. Search engines often use it for the snippet in search results. A meta description tag should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.

Meta Robots

The meta robots tag tells search engines if and how they should crawl your web pages. Use meta robots tags only when you want to restrict the way Google crawls a page, and don’t block pages with meta robots tags in robots.txt.

Meta Viewport

A meta viewport tag sets the visible area of a web page. It is used to instruct the browser how to render the page on different screen sizes (i.e., desktop/tablet/mobile). Use of this tag indicates to Google that the page is mobile-friendly, which is significant because Google ranks mobile-friendly web pages higher in mobile search results as of 2015.

 

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Learn more about metatags, along with code examples and best practices at metatags.org.