Web pages need a handful of meta tags on their road to success. Meta tags are the pieces of code placed inside the HTML that we call “metadata”. They declare some very critical information about the page up front: the title, the description, the language and country it addresses, the character set, who wrote the content. We looked at what meta tags do for SEO in detail before. In this piece we will go through what the 10 most important meta tags are, and share the code for each.
We would suggest writing the meta description as though you were posting a tweet.
The Most Important Meta Tags for SEO
- 1. The title tag
- 2. The meta description tag
- 3. Heading tags (H1-H6)
- 4. The meta keywords tag
- 5. The meta robots tag
- 6. The meta viewport tag
- 7. The canonical tag
- 8. The hreflang tag
- 9. The character set tag
- 10. The author tag
The Title Tag
The <title> tag carries the title you wrote to describe the page to your visitors.
<head>
<title>
A Türk SEM title example
</title>
</head>The Meta Description Tag
The <meta name="description"> tag is where you explain what the page a user is on, or about to visit, is actually about.
<head>
<meta name="description"
content="Explain here what your page is about.">
</head>A detailed look at the meta description, with a test tool
Heading Tags (H1-H6)
The heading tags running from <h1> down to <h6> show the content hierarchy of your page. Using headings and subheadings is what gets your site content organized properly.
<h1>The hierarchy of heading tags</h1>You can test whether your page has a sound hierarchy from our heading tags piece.
The Meta Keywords Tag
The <meta name="keywords"> tag no longer counts for as much as it once did, but you can still use it to describe your content, keeping it to 3 keywords. What matters is picking the most accurate words. It still has a triggering effect for some search engines other than Google.
<head>
<meta name="keywords"
content="Meta tags, Meta tag">
</head>The Meta Robots Tag
The <meta name="robots"> tag is a meta tag that hands search engine bots a set of directives.
- “index”: index this page
- “follow”: follow the links
- “nofollow”: do not follow the links
<head>
<meta name="robots"
content="index, follow">
</head> Robots.txt checker
The Meta Viewport Tag
The <meta name="viewport"> tag is the meta tag that states how the site should be displayed at different screen sizes, which is what keeps the user experience high. We explained this in detail in what the viewport meta tag is.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=5">That is the viewport code we recommend.
The Canonical Tag
The canonical tag, also known as “rel=canonical”, is an HTML element used in search engine optimization (SEO) to state the preferred or original version of a web page.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/turksem">On our what the canonical tag is, with a code test page you can check how you are using canonical and read the detailed write-up.
The Hreflang Tag
On multilingual sites this is one of the first meta tags you have to use to get country and language targeting right.
<link rel="alternate" href="URL_of_alternate_page" hreflang="language_code">The Character Set Tag
<meta charset="UTF-8"> points at the character set the page uses. Which is why using it correctly matters a great deal.
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
The Author Tag
The <meta name="author"> tag is one of the basic tags showing which author wrote the page. It carries a parameter that builds trust for SEO, and it is a tag you must use on YMYL sites.
<meta name="author" content="Author name / surname">
