Basics for HTML SEO Meta Tags
Meta tags are invisible for normal visitors. They provide information about the HTML document. This information can be useful for search engines. There are some descriptive meta tags that contain information about the content of a website, but there are also meta tags that tell search engines how to interpret and read the content of a website. Visit this link to learn more about the basic structure of a meta tag. Here is a short revision:
The charset
attribute is used to set the character set of a page:
In addition, you can add a lang-
attribute to specific meta tags. This attribute will set the meta tags language.
Here is a usage example of the lang-
attribute:
The meta tag named keywords
contains keywords for the website. At the moment most search engines
consider this tag as unimportant. Some search engines even ignore it.
Nevertheless you should use this meta tag because it still contains information about your website. Note that the amount of keywords mustn't be too short or too long.
The meta tag named description
describes the content of a page. This is a short description and should not be a novel.
Meta tags that tell search engines how to interpret the content of a page
For search engines, for example google, there are some meta tags that tell them how to interpret the content of a website. One of these tags is named robots
.
The tag can contain two keywords: 1. index
or noindex
| 2. follow
or nofollow
.
Index
allows search engines to index the page and show it in search results, noindex is the opposite. Follow
allows the search engines to follow the links on a page, nofollow prohibits it.
Special Google Tags
There are some special meta tags for google. For example it is possible to establish that there mustn't be a content-snippet as a description for a page.
When you use this, google displays a result of the page without a description. It is also possible to tell search engines that they musn't save the content of a page in their cache. The cache is used to make the contents of a page available, even if the server is unavailable.
"Useless" tags
publisher, author, copyright, revisit-after, expires
and audience
have one thing in common:
they use valuable space in the source code and can be evaluated only by special technical catalogs.
In addition, this data can also be in the imprint of a page.