What are Meta Tags?

In a nutshell, meta tags are elements of source code used to describe the main topic of a page, or give extra information about a page.

While there are many different meta tags, global elements, and rel attributes in the HTML code language, when it comes SEO, there are three in particular that are often collectively referred to as “meta tags”.

They are essentially short text descriptors in the code of a page that help search engines understand a page’s content and context. Meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, so they are not user-facing, but their text does sometimes appear in the tab of the browser, and frequently in the snippet of a webpage in a SERP.

The Big Three SEO Meta Tags: Title, Description, Canonical

• Title tag

• The title tag is the HTML title of a webpage, and generally the most important page element in which to include your main target keywords.

• Usually used as the text for the big blue link in the SERP.

• It’s best practice to keep title tag text between 50 - 70 characters, so that the text does not get truncated on the SERP.
  

• Description

• A description tag is the description of a webpage. Description tag text does not impact ranking, but does impact click-through rate.

• It’s helpful to think of the description text as free advertising copy, and to try to describe your page in a compelling way, to encourage searchers to click on your snippet instead of your competitor’s.

• It’s best practice to keep description text between 155 - 160 characters, anything above this character limit may get truncated.
  

• Canonical URL

• A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a webpage.

• Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs.

• Practically speaking, the canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results.
  

• Keywords

• The meta keyword tag is ignored by Google, so there is no need to include it in the HTML template, or to populate the tag your template includes by default.