Meta tags for SEO
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3 min read
Table of Contents
What are meta tags and how they can help with SEO?
First let’s quickly understand what HTML meta tags are.
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 and generally look like this. 
Meta tags for SEO
As we now know that meta tags are used to provide additional information to search engines, let’s look at the common meta tags that are added and what they are used for.
Meta description
HTML
<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 description is unique for each page. Avoid generic descriptions and try to describe in short the content of the page.
Meta viewport
HTML
<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. This tag also indicates to search engines whether a page is mobile friendly or not.
This is important because Google ranks mobile friendly sites and pages higher.
Meta charset
HTML
<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 and rank them. If the charset is different, then your pages might not be understood correctly by search engines.
Meta OG
HTML
<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, Instagram etc…
Meta twitter
HTML
<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 as it doesn’t accept the OG tags. Configure them to render open graph images on Twitter/X properly.
Open graph images provide a better user experience. This ensures more users click on your links and in return search engines rank your links higher.
Summary
Meta tags provide you with an opportunity of telling search engines more about your site and it’s individual pages. Make sure you add all the above meta tags to your site and pages to score better in SEO.
If you are looking for a simple and easy way to find meta tags for a site, try out Meta Explorer. It is completely FREE to use.
Now that you know what Meta tags are and why they are important for SEO, checkout our other post on how to view meta tags in Chrome browser?