What are the important meta tags that I should post on my website?

Question

There seems to be a huge amount of meta tags that you can set. I guess some of them are more important than others.

What are the most important meta tags for delivery and why?

Do I even need meta tags? (looking at the stackoverflow homepage no)

Answer 1

I understand that this question is old, but it is still the best hit by Google, so I decided to give an updated answer, including popular social networking sites.

I usually have four groups of meta information:

Regular meta information - used by search engines and browsers

<title>{{pageTitle}}</title> <meta charset="utf-8"><!-- html5 version of http-equiv="Content-Type"... --> <meta name="description" content="{{description}}"> <meta name="keywords" content="{{keywords}}"> <link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/{{googlePlusId}}" /> <link rel="canonical" href="{{pageUrl}}" /> 

Facebook meta info - used by Facebook when someone shares your URL

 <meta property="og:url" content="{{pageUrl}}"> <meta property="og:image" content="{{imageUrl}}"> <meta property="og:description" content="{{description}}"> <meta property="og:title" content="{{pageTitle}}"> <meta property="og:site_name" content="{{siteTitle}}"> <meta property="og:see_also" content="{{homepageUrl}}"> 

Google+ metalic information - used by Google+ when someone shares your URL

 <meta itemprop="name" content="{{pageTitle}}"> <meta itemprop="description" content="{{description}}"> <meta itemprop="image" content="{{imageUrl}}"> 

Note: you really don’t need it, Google+ will return to the Open Graph tags that Facebook uses.

Twitter Meta Info - Used by Twitter when someone shares your URL.

 <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"> <meta name="twitter:url" content="{{pageUrl}}"> <meta name="twitter:title" content="{{pageTitle}}"> <meta name="twitter:description" content="{{description}}"> <meta name="twitter:image" content="{{imageUrl}}"> 

Answer 2

I will use the same answer from this question :

A few years ago, meta tags were important for search engine optimization. However, they were offended and generally ignored by almost all search engines (including Google, Yahoo and Live search. Sorry: Bing).

The most important SEO tags you can include in your (X) HTML are the <title> and <meta name="description"...> tags.

• <title> should usually be what you want the search engine to list your page.
• <meta name="description"...> can sometimes give the search engine a basic idea of ​​how to describe your page when indexing it.

However, using these two tags will not necessarily matter to increase the visibility of your site in search engine listings. For more information on this aspect, Google has a good SEO section on their website.

Answer 3

Upgrade to 2015: still being a very popular answer, I recommend you see @alden answer as it is much more updated than my own (6 years)

The original answer follows:

---

 <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8"> 

To tell the browser what content type and encoding

 <meta NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP"> 

See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-supports-meta-noodp-tag/ for what

 <meta name="description"...> 

Obvious

 <meta name="keywords"...> 

Google does not use this, but other search engines may

 <meta HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Tue, 20 Jun 1995 04:13:09 GMT"> 

If you know when you like this page to cache out

Answer 4

The most important meta tag you should use:

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> 

adjusted. This ensures that if you ever need to transfer this HTML document using something other than a web server (for example, working with it locally, sending as an attachment), the user agent is aware of its type and character set. Just make sure your server headers agree.

Answer 5

Best SEO is a website that effectively meets the needs of targeted users. To do this, you need to have a website that has something that people can use, want or need. This value and its most important. It can be anything from good articles to entertaining videos or useful downloads. Tags support good content but cannot replace it for SEO. If the content is good enough, tags are not needed. Believe me, when I say, if your site has anything, anything or anything that they can’t get anywhere, your site will be fine in every way, tags or tags. If your site is boring and does not matter, it will fail tags or tags.

Answer 6

The description meta tag will be used by Google as a description of your site. I think this is the most important.

I think meta-checking-v1 is important. This allows you to use the Google Webmaster tool.

Answer 7

GoogleBot ignores metadata, only trusting the content of the page itself, not the content descriptors. Thus, the usefulness of some tags may be limited.

Answer 8

I would make sure you have the title, description, keyword and revisit-after tag on your web pages. Although Google does not weigh the keyword tag, it can still be used by smaller search engines.