HTML meta tags: a practical and comprehensive guide to effective SEO management
Invisible to users but vitally important to search engines, they are small content descriptors that help us tell crawlers what a page is about. More specifically, meta tags are areas of HTML code that contain information about a site and that specific page, and are therefore a key component in creating optimized web pages that are easily indexed by search engines. So let’s delve into what and what HTML meta tags are and why they are an important part of a sound SEO strategy.
What meta tags are
HTML meta tags are small snippets of text that serve to describe the content of a page for search engines: unlike other pieces of code or old tags that appeared (and sometimes still appear) in sites and especially blogs, in fact, these snippets only exist in the page code in HTML, do not affect the graphical layout and are not visible to ordinary readers except through the display in the source code (if used, in fact, meta tags appear at the top – the head – of the displayed content).
The extended name would be metadata and derives from the union of the words meta (from the Greek μετὰ “beyond, after, by means”) and data (Latin plural of datum “information”): it means that these tags give more information and data about the page to which they refer, and it is basically data on the page.
The meaning of HTML meta tags: the alphabet of SEO
Thus, meta tags are HTML elements that provide information about the content of a web page to search engines, and they are located within the <head> element of an HTML page.
Although they are not visible to the user visiting the page, they play a crucial role in indexing and ranking the site in search results, so much so that they are often referred to as the “alphabet of SEO“: just as the letters of the alphabet combine to form words and phrases, meta tags combine to create an overall picture of the content of a web page, which help