September 9, 2024
Meta tags for SEO
A practical overview of the common HTML meta tags used for search engines, social previews, and mobile rendering.
What are meta tags and how can they help with SEO?
meta tags are HTML tags that are added to a web page to provide additional information to search engines and other clients. meta tags are added to the <head> section of your HTML page.
Meta tags for SEO
Meta tags are used to provide additional information to search engines. Here are the common meta tags that are added and what they are used for.
Meta description
<meta name="description" content="Page description">Using the description meta tag, you can provide a short description of your page. This can also be used by search engines in their search results.
Ensure the description is unique for each page. Avoid generic descriptions and describe the page concisely.
Meta viewport
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">This tag tells the browser how to render a page on a mobile device. It also indicates to search engines whether a page is mobile friendly.
This is important because Google ranks mobile-friendly sites and pages higher.
Meta charset
<meta charset="utf-8">Charset meta tag tells the browser about the character encoding to be used for the page. This ensures that a search engine reads your content correctly.
Meta OG
<meta property="og:url" content="https://metaexplorer.co/">
<meta property="og:title" content="Meta Tags have never been easier to find.">These are Open Graph meta tags. These tags help you control how URLs are displayed when shared on social media like Facebook and Instagram.
Meta Twitter
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Meta Tags have never been easier to find.">These are meta tags specific to Twitter/X. Configure them to render Open Graph images on Twitter/X properly.
Summary
Meta tags give you an opportunity to tell search engines more about your site and its individual pages. Make sure you add the right meta tags to your pages to score better in SEO.
If you are looking for a simple way to find meta tags for a site, try out Meta Explorer. It is completely free to use.