Meta title and description are the vital components of any web page for search engines to crawl and index. Search engines use meta tags to learn what the content of the page is all about, and also displays the meta description on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). The meta keywords tag is no longer valued by search engines, so it is up to the author to include it. Our online meta tags analyzer fetches meta tags from a supplied URL, and review them against recommendations.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags describe the content of a web page, but they don't appear on browsers. They are intended to let search engines know that the content is about, and users can only view them in the source view. An example of meta tags displayed in source view is like below.
A search engine like Google crawls the web page, index the page, and display the results in SERP like below:
The meta tags are placed in the <head> tags within HTML, and the elements begins with meta, i.e. <meta description="...">. SEO is all about contents, and meta tags help search engines what to look for in your web page. The notable meta tags that help SEO include:
- title: The title is not a meta tag, but it defines the title of your web page. It is important to have a meaningful title of your page.
- meta description: The meta description tag is an HTML element that provides a summary of your web page. The meta description is displayed on the search enging result page (SERP), and lets the user know what the content is about.
- meta keywords: The meta keywords is a list of keywords that are relavent about page's content. Although this used to be a good way to let search engines know what keywords are relavent to the contents, it is no longer used by major search engines like google. This is an optional keywords you can add to your HTML page.
There are many more meta tags that you can add to your HTML to describe contents of your web page. Additional meta tags include author, open graph, content-type, and many more.