What are Meta Tags
SEO Jargon Explained
What Are Meta Tags?
When you do a search and see the short description under the address of the websites listed on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) that is Meta data (or Meta information).
It is a short description written for the search engines to use but is not displayed on the web page that your visitors read.
This is the most obvious example of a Meta Tag.
If you do not write a meta description then the first few lines of normal text on your web page will automatically appear as the short description.
Google calls the information below the page title a snippet, this video shows how Google choose which information to use for the snippet if you do not tell them what to write using a Meta Tag.
(The open directory project was data about web pages collected and filed by humans, It closed in March 2017)
Any data written for search engines to use, to specify page details, without being displayed on the visible web page is Meta Data.
Data written exclusively for the search engines is called machine parsable (meaning it can easily be read by computers).
This data is written uses a piece of code called a Meta Tag which tells the search engines to use the data without displaying it on the web pages.
Meta Tags help search engines to make sense of what the page is all about (it could be described as data about data). They may contain keywords and other information about the page you want indexed, such as the author of an article, page description etc....
If you have a Google Business or Site123 website, don't worry about Meta Tags as they are all taken care of.
If you have your own WordPress site there are free plug-ins which will do this for you.
We recommend the free Yoast SEO for WordPress plug-in. It make writing both meta descriptions and meta tag page titles (see What is a Web Page Title) really easy, without using any code.
Have a look at some of our other SEO Jargon buster articles to help with your DIY SEO.