Guides · · Davi Netto
HTML meta tags
What HTML meta tags are, what each one is for and which ones are essential for your site's SEO.
Meta tags often raise a lot of questions among marketers who are digging a little deeper into a site’s code and into SEO strategies.
What are meta tags?
HTML meta tags briefly describe your site’s content and how it should be interpreted by browsers and search engines. They contain the page’s description, its author, keywords and some more technical information.
The main meta tags
The charset meta tag
Sets the character encoding of the page’s text. This is important to make sure special characters, such as accented letters, are displayed correctly by your browser.
<meta charset="utf-8">The viewport meta tag
The viewport tells the browser how to size the page correctly for the device the visitor is browsing on.
By convention, we usually use the setting below:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">The theme-color meta tag
Some browsers use this meta tag to offer visitors a more immersive visual experience. Google Chrome on mobile uses this color to paint the address bar in the site’s theme color.
The meta tag accepts values in hex code.
<meta name="theme-color" content="#4e698d"/>The robots meta tag
Tells Google and other search engines whether or not the page should be indexed in search results.
To tell search engines the page should be indexed, use:
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">To tell search engines the page should not be indexed, use:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">The publisher meta tag
Some web developers use this tag to record who built the site. It’s a kind of signature of the person who developed it.
You can add your company’s name to this tag.
<meta name="publisher" content="Raszio (www.raszio.com)" />The author meta tag
Sets the author of the page’s content. For an article or post, this tag should contain the name of whoever wrote the text.
<meta name="author" content="Davi Netto">The description meta tag
A description of the page’s content.
Search engines such as Google use the text of this tag to show the page’s description in search results. That’s why we recommend that the text of this tag not exceed 153 characters, which is, on average, the maximum number of characters Google shows.
When this meta tag isn’t added, search engines use some text they find in the body of the page, which may not be the most interesting or desirable text.
<meta name="description" content="Learn about HTML meta tags and how to use them correctly to get the most out of organic search.">Final thoughts
HTML meta tags are important for search engines to better understand the content of each page of your site, but it doesn’t stop there.
There are a number of other properties we can add to the site’s <head> that can improve your site’s SEO, such as the canonical link, Open Graph tags, app-specific tags and structured data.
