Introduction To Meta Tags: How Important Are They To SEO?
Meta tags are metadata tags that provide crawlers and web browsers with details about your web page. Meta tags are usually mentioned in the context of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engine crawlers (for example: Googlebot) look for certain meta tags on your website to help format your listing in the Google search results or provide other instructions. Meta tags are to be placed between the 'head' tags of your web page. Some of those tags are:
Meta title tags. Example:
Meta description tags. Example:
Meta robots tags. Example:
Meta title tags are often, but not always used as the title of your search result. Search engines will try to use something else as the title if you don't have a meta title tag. This may have undesirable consequences such as an incorrect title, or it may just show the domain name instead. This is not encouraging to users who are considering clicking through to your website. If you find that Google Search is showing your website's title in the results as 'www.kompulsa.com' instead of 'Kompulsa' (and i've seen worse), then that is a sign you may be missing the meta tag. It's safe to say that your website should have a meta title tag.
Meta description tags are frequently, but not always used as the description of your web page's search result. It tells users about the content of your website and can heavily impact their decision to click through to it. This means that while Google itself doesn't take your meta description title too seriously in its ranking decisions, it is still of significant importance to users who are browsing search results for the most relevant one. Ensure that you have a meta description tag, and that it is clear, descriptive.
Meta robots tags provide specific instructions directing search engines on what to do, rather than about your website's content. In the example above, 'noindex' means that the page with the tag should be excluded from search results. 'nofollow' means that none of the links nor content in the page containing the tag is to pass PageRank or be considered an endorsement.
The meta keywords tag won't be described in significant detail here because it is no longer important to making your website rank in Google Search results. The meta title tag has a history of abuse by spammers back when search engines relied on it. It was referred to as 'keyword stuffing', and it enabled website owners to flood out search results with their own by entering as many incoherent, irrelevant keywords as possible since search engines were unable to interpret English nor assess content quality at the time. It was used to tell search engines what kind of content was on your web page. Search engines now use machine learning and natural language processing to get an idea of what kind of content is on your website.