Meta Tags
The <meta> element provides metadata about a document — information that describes the page but is not displayed to visitors directly. Meta tags live inside <head> and are void elements (no closing tag).
Two shapes of meta tag
Almost every meta tag uses one of two attribute pairs:
name / content — describes document-level metadata, like author, description, or viewport settings.
http-equiv / content — simulates an HTTP response header from within the HTML, such as a refresh directive or content type.
<!-- name / content --> <meta name="description" content="Learn HTML from the ground up." /> <meta name="author" content="Let Codes" /> <!-- http-equiv / content --> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30" /> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
The description meta tag
<meta name="description"> supplies the short summary search engines often display beneath the title in results (the "snippet"). It does not directly affect ranking, but a well-written one increases click-through rate.
<meta name="description" content="A beginner-friendly guide to HTML meta tags: what they do, which ones matter for SEO, and which are obsolete." />
Guideline | Recommendation |
|---|---|
Length | Roughly 150–160 characters before truncation |
Uniqueness | One tailored description per page |
Content | A genuine summary, not a list of keywords — write for humans |
The robots meta tag
<meta name="robots"> tells crawlers how to treat the page. Common values can be combined with commas.
<!-- Default behavior, rarely needed explicitly --> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> <!-- Keep this page out of search results, but still crawl its links --> <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" /> <!-- Don't index and don't follow links from this page --> <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
Preview | Meaning |
|---|---|
index | Allowed to appear in search results (default) |
noindex | Never show this page in search results |
follow | Crawl the links found on this page (default) |
nofollow | Don't pass link authority through this page's links |
The (obsolete) keywords meta tag
<meta name="keywords" content="html, tutorial, web development" />
This tag once let authors list target keywords directly. It was abused so heavily with irrelevant, stuffed keyword lists that major search engines — including Google — stopped using it as a ranking signal entirely, more than a decade ago. It is safe to omit; including it has no SEO benefit today.
charset for text encoding, viewport for responsive layout, and the Open Graph / Twitter Card family (og:*, twitter:*) for social link previews — each covered in their own dedicated pages.