What are meta tags and why are they important?

Meta tags are HTML elements placed in the <head> section of web pages that provide metadata about the page to browsers, search engines, and social media platforms. They don't appear in the visible page content but influence how the page is displayed, indexed, and shared.

SEO meta tags:

  • <title> - Page title shown in search results and browser tabs
  • <meta name="description"> - Snippet shown in search results
  • <meta name="keywords"> - Largely deprecated but historically used for search keywords
  • <meta name="robots"> - Controls indexing and following links with values like index,follow or noindex,nofollow
  • <link rel="canonical"> - Specifies the preferred URL when duplicate content exists

Social media meta tags:

  • Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url) - Used by Facebook, LinkedIn, and others to render rich previews when links are shared
  • Twitter Cards (twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image) - For Twitter-specific previews

Technical meta tags:

  • <meta charset="utf-8"> - Character encoding
  • <meta name="viewport"> - Responsive design settings for mobile
  • <meta http-equiv="refresh"> - Page redirects

Why they matter:

  • Directly impact SEO rankings and click-through rates
  • Control how content appears on social media
  • Influence whether search engines index pages
  • Provide technical instructions to browsers
  • Help with analytics and verification (like Google Search Console)

For web scraping:

  • Provide structured data about pages
  • Help identify content type and purpose
  • Contain canonical URLs to avoid duplicates
  • Reveal technical implementation details

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