Meta tags are the HTML tag used for search engine crawlers to get to know about the webpage. Meta tags are placed in the HEAD tag of webpage & that’s not directly visible to the visitor. Meta tags carry the important information of webpage like page description, keyword, author, etc. This Meta tags information plays a vital role in Search Engine Optimization. Meta tags optimization comes under the ON-PAGE optimization technique. In past Meta tags play a role of primary parameters in search engine optimization.

There are mainly four types of Meta Tags everyone must need to know about.

Title Tag

The title tag appears in the title bar of browsers when a user views the web page. The TITLE tag is an important one for major search engines like Google as this is the first one indexed and it is given a higher weighting in the relevance rankings. It’s the best technique to put an impact on the search engine & end-user to make page titles as keyword-relevant as possible & not more than 70 characters.

How to write Meta Keywords Tag?

<title>Up to 70 Characters of Keyword-relevant text here</title>

Read More about Title Tag Optimization here

Meta Description Tag
Meta description tag is the most important Meta tag because it holds the actual description of the webpage which helps search engine to know about the webpage & its topic. Meta description also helps to drive traffic to your website, as many search engine like Google shows Meta description in search result with the website title & link. Meta description must be summarized in less than 170 words as per google guidelines.

How to write a Meta Description Tag?

Meta Keywords

Meta keywords are nothing but a list of relevant keywords for which you want to show your site in the search results. These keywords are the content concept on which your webpage is written. Nowadays most of the search engines didn’t consider Meta Keywords as a parameter to boost webpage ranking in the search engine, but it’s always a good practice to write these on-page.

How to write Meta Keywords Tag?

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, nofollow” />

Meta Robots Tag
Most of the search engine crawlers by default try to index all website pages & try to follow links. But to control this you need to take the help of Robots Tag. In Robots tag you specify the exact pages that you do NOT want the search engine to crawl and indexed. In some scenarios, on your site, you have content that you want to keep as it is but doesn’t want it to index. Listing these pages in the Meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them from being indexed (The other way is by using a robot.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it).

How to write Meta Robots Tag?

Meta Robots Attribute

NOINDEX – Use to prevent the page from getting the index.
NOFOLLOW – Use to prevent Googlebot from following any links on the webpage.
NONE – Is equivalent to both NOINDEX & NOFOLLOW.
NOSNIPPET – Use to prevent a description from appearing below the webpage link in the search results also prevents caching of the webpage.
NOODP – It blocks the Open Directory Project description of the webpage from being used in the description that appears below the webpage in the search results.
NOARCHIVE – Use to prevent a cached copy of the webpage from being available in the search results.

Conclusion:

We’ve talked a lot about the types of Meta Tags which can have an impact on search engine marketing. What we get to know from above all
– The Title Tag alone can impact your search engine rankings.
– Descriptive tags may encourage users to visit your site.
– The Meta description may serve as “organic ad text.”

Ranking high in Google in 2016 or hereafter has far more to do with relevance & the reputation of high-quality content, user experience and website popularity than meta tag optimization.