What Is a Meta Tag? (How do They Function?)

Today, we live in a world of the internet. It has become a major part of our lives, and we cannot give up on using the internet. Almost everywhere we go, we are looking for an internet connection and ask for the wifi password. We can see that the internet is something crucial, especially for businesses. All kinds of business have websites now. When setting up these sites, you will come across the term ‘Meta Tag.’ So what is a meta tag?

If you are going to set up a website for your business or hire some professionals to do it for you, you have to know what meta tag is. It has an important effect on your website. Think of it like this: You are going to buy a car, you go to the dealership, and you will see some panels next to the cars, stating their features, price, etc. A meta tag is sort of the same thing for a website.

Meta tag includes metadata. It is basically an explanation of what your website is about. Meta tag includes metadata about the HTML document. Meta tag is not displayed on the web page. It is on the background of your website, telling crawlers about your page.

Meta elements are usually the description of your page, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata. If you want crawlers (search engines) to follow your website, you have to have robots tag with index and follow. If you type noindex and nofollow to the robots meta tag, your website will not be crawled by search engines and will not be seen on the SERPs as well. Of course, it might be useful if you haven’t finished developing your website yet.

What Is a Meta Tag Example?

Let’s see what kind of content meta tags include. In an HTML document, the content inside the ‘<>’ signs are called tags. Meta tags provide the general information about your website to the search engines.

A viewport meta tag contains the information about how your website will look on certain devices according to their size and width etc. A meta description tag shows the description of your website. You can type the description here yourself. Robots meta tag allows your page to be indexed and followed by search engines.

Here are some of the metatags of Dopinger blog:

The last example here shows the description of the page. The description can be seen under the link of your website on the SERP. Here is how it looks:

How to Add Meta Tags to WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system written in PHP. It is a life saviour when it comes to developing a website. WordPress makes things pretty easier for web developers by having pre-made templates.

To add meta tags to WordPress, you need to install plugins to it. Yet, after you do that, it is easier to add meta tags than ever.

For adding meta tags, we recommend you to get Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. It is quite easy to use it. Here are the steps to install Yoast SEO and start using it:

Install the plugin in WordPress.
Activate the plugin.
To edit your material, click on Pages or Posts.
Click on the ‘Edit’ button under the page or post title to make changes.
Scroll down and go to the Yoast SEO section.
Click on the ‘Edit Snippet’ button.
Type your SEO title and meta description to the boxes.
Click on Update to save your changes.

Now you have easily added meta tags to your website without even dealing with HTML codes. You can also add keywords and write your texts according to those keywords.

Meta Tags for SEO

Meta tags play an important role in SEO. They are not just informing the search engines when they crawl your website; they also provide information for visitors as well.

Keywords are crucial in meta tags. You can enter your keywords in meta tags, so when someone writes them in the search bar, those keywords will help your page to appear higher in the search results. Where are meta tags? How can I see the keywords in meta tags? To see any meta tag of a website, simply right-click anywhere on the website and select ‘View page source’ to see the tags.

Another crucial point of meta tags in SEO is the meta description. As we have stated before, it is a good way to show what your site is about to the potential visitors. If you use the right keywords in the meta description, you will have higher chance to be clicked by potential visitors.

Conclusion

We have answered the question ‘what is a meta tag?’ and covered some of their features with examples. We hope this article has been helpful to get around the idea of what meta tag is and how to apply them on your website. We have also mentioned about how to add meta tags to WordPress by Yoast SEO.

If you want to learn more about SEO, please read our latest articles about it.

Frequently Asked Questions About

How do I create a meta tag?

You can write meta tags in a text editing program, such as Notepad. Type your meta tags in the program and log in to your hosting provider. Insert the meta content in the portion of the file and save the file.

Are meta tags important?

Yes, they are important because they affect how your site appears in the SERPs and how many people would be interested to click on your website. They have an impact on your traffic and engagement rates.

What meta tags should I use?

You should use title tag, meta description, canonical tag, alternative text tag, robots meta tag, open graph meta tags and Twitter cards, header tags, and responsive design meta tags.