<Meta> tags are used by search engines to identify the content of web pages, or, to indicate an action to take, they are always found between <head> </head> tags. There are many legends referring to this topic, since there are search engines, such as Google, that do not take them into account, and what they do is index the content, my opinion is that it does not cost anything to place them since we could get visits thanks to these tags through other search engines.
Enter the main ones that are used, I will highlight the following:
- Keywords.
<meta name=” keywords” content=” keywords separated by commas”>.
They are used so that when users enter keywords in the search engine, they can locate the pages that contain these words. Due to how easy it is to manipulate this field, the legend says that Google no longer takes this meta tag into account, the legend also says that Yahoo continues to use them …, just in case I continue adding them in all my projects, being an algorithm, at any time it can become very important again, and it costs nothing to introduce them.
- Description.
<meta name=”description” content=”page description”>
The description should not be excessively long, 160 characters is the maximum allowed by search engines, generally, it is the information that appears in search engines in the description of the page, I say generally because sometimes it shows the content of the web instead of the meta description. For me, the most important. - Language.
<meta name=”Language” content=”es”>
Indicates to search engines the language of the web page, although search engines take domains into account, in the event that it is .com, which is a global domain, it would help search engines to identify the language that is being used on the page. - Author.
<meta name=” Author” content=” Name of the person or company that has made the web”>
Well, this tag is another one, it doesn’t make much sense for search engines, for me, it’s like someone who signs a painting at the end of it, that is, it indicates who has made the web design. - Robots.
<meta name=”Robots” content=”All”>
It is used to indicate to search engines which parts should be indexed, for example, it could be used to restrict access to an administration panel, I have to say that I do not use this tag use, since I include the necessary information in a text file called robots.txt (In another chapter we will explain the use of this file). - Revisit.
<meta name=”Revisit” content=”1 day”>
This tag tells search engines how often they should re-crawl the page, for example, if you have a store and you add products daily you should put 1 day, in the case of forums the content can change every hour or even every minute, in practice search engines have managed to know how often a web page is updated, so even if you put 1 day if you update a week, the robot will not return daily. If you use it, don’t lie because it’s nonsense. - Canonical.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.pagina-correcta.html” />
I discovered this tag recently and its use can save us from receiving any penalty from search engines for having duplicate content, then we will use it when we have two pages with the same content (duplicate content) and that are accessed by different URLs, in the label we will introduce the URL of the correct page, in practice when we create virtual stores and perform searches by articles or manufacturers, the same product you can have several input URLs, I think that with this explanation it has been clarified.
