What are Meta Tags?

From secret to banishment and now back again - these are the meta tags. The HTML tags of the web page are invisible, but they are becoming increasingly important for positioning in search results. They start with "meta", are in the source code of the web page and - used correctly - help to improve the search engine ranking, but should also improve the click-through rate and lead the user to the page.

The best-known meta tags include the keywords META name="keywords" and the description text META name="description". The text stored in the description is displayed to the user in the search engine hits. However, the user never sees the keywords - and the search engine does not rely exclusively on the keywords named in the HTML code either.

Some search engines ignore the keywords completely, while others weight them according to very different criteria. Some doubt it, but the rumor that Google does not take keywords into account in its algorithms persists. However, the Description meta tag is read and used by all search engines.

The content of the Description meta tag appears as text to the search engine result. And this is often where it is decided whether the user calls up the page or not. A total of 156 characters are displayed, Google currently displays about 140 characters, but does not use the description for ranking a web page.

< META name="description" content="Web page description for the search engine user" >

The content of the meta description should follow the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) principle, with a unique meta description created for each URL. Tools such as the SERP snippet generator show a preview and support the optimization of title and description of a web page; the goal: to achieve as many clicks as possible.

For the structure of the meta description, the first part should encourage clicks and contain the essential keywords. After a period, comma or call sign follows the second part of the meta description, in which the less important keywords or the main keyword are placed again.

Maximum 4 to 5 keywords are recommended in the meta keywords, because the number lowers the value for a keyword.

< META name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, combinations of keywords" >

Ignored or not - the keywords should not be missing in the HTML coding and can play a greater role again in future changes of search engine algorithms.

For the European language area, the website should also load the European character set (content type) with the umlauts right at the beginning. This means that the meta tags can also be written with umlauts, which are then converted accordingly by the search engines - for example, "Prüfung" becomes "Pruefung".

Load the European character set: < META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ >

Set the language of the web page to German: < META HTTP-EQUIV="Language" CONTENT="de" >

The robots follow the links of the web page and index them if the web page includes the following HTML statement:

< META name="robots" content="index, follow" >