Sunday 5 February 2017

Importance of Meta Tags in Search Engines


The <meta> tag provides metadata about the HTML document. Metadata will not be displayed on the page, but will be machine parsable. Meta elements are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata.

The metadata can be used by browsers (how to display content or reload page), search engines (keywords), or other web services. HTML5 introduced a method to let web designers take control over the viewport (the user's visible area of a web page), through the <meta> tag.

You should include the following <meta> viewport element in all your web pages:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
A <meta> viewport element gives the browser instructions on how to control the page's dimensions and scaling.

How Google Meta Tags Impact SEO

Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s code. We all know tags from blog culture, and meta tags are more or less the same thing, little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.

The only difference between tags you can see (on a blogpost, say) and tags you can’t see is location: meta tags only exist in HTML, usually at the “head” of the page, and so are only visible to search engines (and people who know where to look). The “meta” stands for “metadata,” which is the kind of data these tags provide – data about the data on your page.

Do Meta Tags Help SEO?

Yes, they do, but not all of them and not all of the time. One of the goals of this page is to explain which meta tags help you to get the word out and which have become passé. (See Know Your Meta Tags below).

If you want to find out whether a given page is using meta tags, just right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source.”

A new tab will open in Chrome (in Firefox, it’ll be a pop-up window). The part at the top, or “head” of the page, is where the meta tags could be.



The meta tags will look something like this:

meta tags

Meta tags that Google understands

Share:

0 comments:

Post a Comment