Meta Tags for SEO: How Google Meta Tags Impact SEO

Team TeachWiki

What are meta tags?

Meta tags provide information about your website to search engines. These can include the title, the description of the page, the author (author) or keywords for the page. Within the last 20 years, the meaning of meta tags has changed significantly. While it was initially difficult for Google to understand the content of a website, the webmaster was able to explain the content of the URL to the search engine using keywords and descriptions. Since Google can now use its algorithms to evaluate the pages, the search engine is able to satisfy the search intention for the user. The meta tags are built into the website header.

Structure of a meta tag

The basic structure of a meta tag is composed as follows:

<meta name ← mark that this is a meta information

= "name of the tag" ← the name of the tag is given to the bot here

content="the command"> ← the bot is told how to use the tag

In summary:

<meta name="name of the tag" content="the command">

Examples of meta tags

  • Title Tag

    The title tag, or page title, describes the content of a website. The title tag may consist of a maximum of 70 characters or 465 pixels and should have the keyword to be optimized as close to the front of the text as possible. The title tag is displayed in the Google search results and has an influence on the click rate (CTR).

    Example title tag:

    <title>Title of the website keyword as possible in front</title>

  • Description

    The meta description should consist of a maximum of 160 characters and describe the content of the website. The description is not a direct ranking factor, but it does help improve your click-through rate, as it is also displayed in the search results. You should therefore use this to attract attention and interest and encourage people to click.

    Example description tag:

    <meta name="description" content="Here the description" />

  • Robots tag

    The indexing of your site is controlled using the robots tag. Here you can, for example, exclude indexing of the page using noindex or prohibit following links using nofollow . Since 2020, nofollow has only served as a reminder not to follow the links, but Google no longer has to stick to it.

    Example Robot tag:

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

  • Keyword

    Keywords or so-called keywords with which the page should be found were published here. Due to the manipulation of this tag, it is ignored by Google. A few search engines or directories still use the tag to tag directory entries with it.

    Example keyword tag:

    <meta name="keywords" content="Keyword 1, Keyword 2, Keyword 3" />

  • Content Type

    The Content Type makes it possible to declare the character set for the content of a page. The use of Unicode/UTF8 example content type tag is recommended here if possible:

    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8″>

  • Language

    "Content Language: en" defines the content for German-speaking users in the target area of Germany. For example, if you were to use Chinese punctuation marks in your document, the search engine would still understand the reference to the target group.

    Example language tag:

    <html lang ="en">

  • Viewport

    The viewport tag is important for a correct responsive display. If no tag is included, the browser uses the default value of 980px, i.e. desktop width. This is indirectly relevant to SEO, as it can be assumed that Google will check a website for mobile compatibility.

    Example viewport tag:

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

  • Author

    Information about the author or the publisher of the page.

    Example author tag:

    <meta name="author" content="name of author">

  • Page Topic

    The topic of the website is described using the tag. This can be provided with keywords and category assignment.

    Example page topic tag:

    <META name="page-topic" content="media, education, science">

  • Revist

    This tag is intended to indicate when a crawler should revisit the URL. However, most search engines ignore this tag.

    Example Revist tag:

    <meta name="revisit" content="After 10 days">

Do meta tags affect ranking?

Yes, there are certain meta tags that affect a webpage's ranking on Google. The title tag, which influences the ranking, should be mentioned here in particular. It summarizes website content briefly and concisely, which makes it an important indicator of page content for Google.

Keywords in the meta description, on the other hand, have no effect on the position in the search results. A good meta description is much more about persuading searchers to click with meaningful content. Good meta descriptions increase the click rate, also called click through rate or CTR for short. This often goes hand in hand with the keywords being searched for being present in the meta description. However, meta descriptions do not have a direct influence on the ranking. The title tag, on the other hand, does.

Why are meta tags important?

The Title and Description meta tags are the very first content that searchers read from your page in the search results. And as with many things, the first impression is often decisive. This means: If the text of a meta description is formulated in an appealing way and the content of the underlying page gets to the point, the likelihood that searchers will click on the link is higher. These two meta tags are therefore important because they optimize the click rate (also click through rate, CTR for short) with good content.

In addition, meta tags such as the meta title are used for further orientation on the website. Since the title is also displayed in open tabs, for example, the browser user can orientate himself using tags.

"noindex" or "nofollow" are also meta tags that give Google important information on how to deal with certain pages or links. They are therefore important information for search engines. However, users of the search engine do not see this information. While "noindex" takes a page from the index, i.e. the listing on Google, "nofollow" stands for links that Google should not follow. So no page rank is passed on via link juice .

Which meta tags are important?

There are many different meta tags. Which of these are more important than others always depends entirely on the intention of the set meta tag. In the following, important meta tags are differentiated between "content" and "technical" (so-called robots meta tags).

"Content meta tags" indicate textual content of a website. Classic examples are meta titles or meta descriptions. These two meta tags are very important as they give a brief overview of the page content. This is a crucial point, especially for what is displayed in Google search results. The meta description in particular can be important for whether a searcher clicks or not. Ideally, the description promotes the Click Through Rate (CTR). The title of a page is also used in Google, but is also important for orientation for site visitors. Because the meta title is specified in the open tab of a web browser, which allows a user to find out which subpages he has opened in other tabs.

Important robots meta tags are for example:

  • noindex
  • nofollow
  • language
  • viewport
  • character encoding

While noindex and nofollow decide whether a website should be listed in the Google index or not (noindex) or whether Google should not follow a link (nofollow) including passing on the page rank, language and viewport decide on the displayed language and mobile display.

The content-language tag is in the section of a web page and documents the language and country where the page is primarily relevant. The viewport tag is not part of the classic web standard, as is the language tag according to ISO 639 Language Code, for example. Introduced by Apple, all common web browsers now use the viewport tag. Before the introduction, mobile end devices rendered the websites called up like on the desktop and then scaled them down. With the Specifying the size and dimensions via viewport tag, mobile websites get their own rendering and are therefore better displayed on smartphones or tablets.

Last but not least , character encodings such as UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 should be mentioned. In the area, these indicate which common abbreviations were used in HTML, for example, in order to optimally decode the code of a website. The character encoding then specifies, like a kind of translation book, which common variant was used.

How relevant are meta tags for search engine optimization?

Since in the past a lot of manipulation was done in SEO with the meta tag "keyword", this tag is ignored by Google, for example. Countless strings of search terms lead to no success in the ranking. Likewise, the description has no influence on the improvement of the ranking, this serves much more to improve the click rate (CTR) of your result in the Google results ( SERP ). It is different with the title tag, which still has an influence on the ranking of the website.

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