What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are short lines of HTML in the head section of a web page that describe the page to search engines, browsers and social networks. Visitors do not see them on the page itself, but they decide things visitors do see: the description that may appear under your result in Google, whether the page is allowed into search results at all, how it fits a phone screen and how it looks when someone shares it.

In HTML terms, the meta element holds information about a page that other elements in the head, such as the title, cannot. The page title is therefore a separate element, but it is usually discussed together with meta tags because both shape how the page appears in search, and both are routine parts of on-page SEO.

What meta tags look like

Here is the head section of a page for a mobile dog grooming business:

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <title>Mobile Dog Grooming in Oxford | Example Grooming</title>
  <meta name="description" content="Full grooms, nail trims and puppy visits in our van outside your home. See prices and book a slot online.">
  <meta property="og:title" content="Mobile Dog Grooming in Oxford">
  <meta property="og:image" content="https://www.example.co.uk/images/grooming-van.jpg">
</head>

Each meta tag pairs a name with a value. The description tag has the name “description” and the sentence as its content; the Open Graph tags use a property attribute in place of a name.

The meta tags that matter

Google lists the meta tags it supports and says that it ignores the ones it does not. For a typical business website, these are the ones worth knowing:

• Description. A short summary of the page. Google sometimes uses it for the text under the title in results, the snippet, when it describes the page better than text taken from the page itself. Each page should have its own.
• Robots. Instructions to search engines for this page. The robots meta tag can say noindex (do not show this page in results), nofollow (do not follow its links) or nosnippet (do not show a text snippet). A page with no robots tag is treated as allowed.
• Viewport. Tells browsers how to fit the page to the screen. Google says its presence indicates that the page is mobile friendly, and it is a basic requirement of responsive design.
• Charset. The character encoding, which on modern sites should be UTF-8. Without it, characters such as £ or accented letters can display incorrectly.
• Open Graph tags. The Open Graph protocol controls the title, image and description shown when the page is shared on social networks and in many messaging apps. It names og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url as the required properties.
• google-site-verification. One way to prove to Search Console that you own the site.

Meta tags Google ignores

The keywords meta tag was once used to list the search terms a page targeted. Google now says it is not used by Google Search and has no effect on indexing and ranking at all. Leaving old keyword tags in place does no harm, but writing new ones is wasted effort.

Many other tags that circulate in templates and old tutorials, such as revisit-after, are ignored by Google for the same reason: it processes the tags it supports and skips the rest.

Common meta tag mistakes

• A noindex tag left over from development. A test site is rightly hidden from search, and the tag is copied to the live site at launch. The page then disappears from Google until someone notices.
• The same description on every page. Google’s snippet guidance says identical or similar descriptions across a site are not helpful when individual pages appear in results.
• Two tags that disagree. A theme and an SEO plugin each output a robots or description tag, with different values.
• No viewport tag. Common on older sites built before mobile browsing, and a sign the site may not display properly on phones.
• Descriptions written for search engines. A string of keywords separated by commas gives searchers no reason to click.

How to check the meta tags on a page

1. Open the page in a browser, view the page source and search for “meta” to see every tag and its value.
2. In Google Search Console, the URL Inspection tool shows whether Google is allowed to index the page.
3. A site crawler lists the description and robots tags of every page, which makes missing or duplicated ones easy to spot across a whole site.
4. On WordPress, an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO gives each page fields for its title and description, and settings that control robots tags.

How we work with meta tags

Missing, duplicated and conflicting meta tags are among the issues a technical SEO audit brings to light. For a small website it costs £210. You receive a list of tasks with a recommendation on each, presented on a call, and our development team can make the changes as a separate piece of work.

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