Meta tags and how it impacts on SEO optimization

What are Meta tags ?

An easy way to let understand search engines what page is really about. “Meta means metadata” which type of data these tags provides – data about the data on your page.

Meta tags usually exists in head tag of the html which are only visible to the search engine. You cannot see it in the browser’s output display window.

How meta tags info displays in search results:

Is it helpful for SEO?

Yes it is. One of the goals of this post is to explain which meta tags helps in seo and how.

What are types of Meta Tags?

Meta Keywords Attribute

They are not that much important nowadays because google removed it from its search algorithm. You can put it generally like this. Not required anymore.

Code Example

      <meta name=”keywords” content=”...., ..., ...”>

Meta Description Attribute

It Provide small description about the page shown while searching in google search console. This tag is basically important. Code is given below

Code Example

    <meta name=”description” content=”..............”>

Robots Attribute

Robots used for all the search engines and Googlebot is only used for the Google search engine. These are the most used values for robots.

Values are :

1. Noindex: avoids the URL from being indexed
2. Nofollow: avoids the URL from being indexed in google
3. None: behaves the same as noindex and nofollow
4. noodp: stops the alternative description from the ODP/DMOZ from being used
5. noarchive: avoids Google from showing the Cached link for a page.
6. unavailable_after:[date]: : specify the exact time and date you want to halt crawling and indexing of this page
7. noimageindex: specify that you do not want your page to appear as the referring page for an image that appears in Google search results

Code Example

    <meta name="robots" content="..., ..." />

    <meta name="googlebot" content="...,..."/>

For more important tags you can read here

How can we use Meta Tags for facebook?

Facebook How facebook crawls and display the info about your page. Facebook adopted Open Graph API. This can be controled with the help of following tags:

  <meta property="og:title" content="Facebook Open Graph META Tags"/>

  <meta property="og:image" content="https://davidwalsh.name/wp-content/themes/klass/img/facebooklogo.png"/>

  <meta property="og:site_name" content="David Walsh Blog"/>

  <meta property="og:description" content="Facebook's Open Graph protocol allows for web developers" /> 

To read full documentation click here

How can we use Meta Tags for twitter?

Twitter added a twitter card API for the same idea taken from Facebook Open Graph API. This can be controlled with the help of following tags:

  <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">

  <meta name="twitter:url" content="https://davidwalsh.name/twitter-cards">

  <meta name="twitter:title" content="How to Create a Twitter Card">

  <meta name="twitter:description" content="Twitter's new Twitter Cards API allows developers to add META tags to their website.">

  <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://davidwalsh.name/wp-content/themes/punky/images/logo.png">