Meta tags
What are Meta Tags?
In web page creation, meta tags are elements from the HTML that are used exclusively in the header area of the website. Meta information is mainly used to provide further descriptions for the web page.
What meta tags are there and what do they do?
Description
The Description tag provides search engines with additional descriptive text about the content of a web page. You can see the contents of the description as small text in the search results. The description has an important role in the snippet display and is SEO relevant. The length should not exceed 156 characters, otherwise it will be truncated.
Charset
The Charset meta element is very important within the HTML code of the web page. It provides the web browsers with the information according to which character encoding the documents are noted as bytes.
Example: this specification provides the universal code, which is now considered the standard for web page creation.
Robots
The Robots meta tag is used to instruct search engine bots (crawlers) how to crawl and index the content of the.
The most important attributes here:
- noindex : do not include in the index.
- nofollow: do not follow up all links
- noarchive: do not show cached version of the web page in search results
- nosnippet: Content should not be displayed as an excerpt in the search results
! Important info: There is no guarantee that Google will follow these instructions. Google does not consider the information in the meta robots as binding !
Viewport
The Viewport meta element ensures that the content of a web page is displayed appropriately scaled for the different end devices, such as mobile, tablet or desktop.
The viewport plays a major role here, as the use of mobile devices is rising continuously and is now around 82 % in Germany (as of 2021).
Therefore, it is of great importance that the website is created responsively with a viewport in the HTML document or in the CSS document. Google attaches great importance to providing users with a user-friendly website.
Special case Title Tag
The title tag itself is not a meta element, but an HTML tag, but is often placed in this context, as it interacts with the meta description in terms of SEO optimization.
The tasks of the title tag are to provide a headline to the web page. It is displayed at the top of the tab when the website is accessed and also forms the headline in Google search results.
What is the importance of meta tags for search engine optimization (SEO)?
The content of the title tag and meta description is the first thing the user sees from the website in the search results.
While the title tag fulfills the task of a headline, the meta description provides further descriptive text. Both should reflect the content of the web page. This is because search engines like Google consider relevant text to be a high quality feature.
It is recommended to add a keyword to the text of the title tag as well as the meta description.
Both elements are of high value as an important ranking factor, even though the description is not a direct ranking factor. They should be optimized in interaction, as they play a crucial role in the number of click-through rates (CtR).
If you need assistance with your project you can contact us as SEO Agency in Munich gladly contact.
