What are Meta Tags & How to Create Them

Meta tags are snippets of text in a website's code that describe a page’s content; meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the HTML code within the <head> tag.

Meta tags are more or less just a little content descriptor that helps tell the Googlebot what a web page is about - and having great meta tagging increases your chances of getting indexed & showing up on search.

What do Meta Tags Look Like?

The best way to understand meta tags is to see some - the below meta tags are from the Virgin Australia website code, you can see them yourself by going to the website, right click > select 'view page source' > and within the <head> tag you'll see meta-data'...

How Meta Tags look in the code of a website

How the meta tags display on Google Search pages

As you can see from the meta-title and the search result title, its the same title and also for the meta-name = description, it's the same as the Google search result description.

Hot Tip: Put simply, meta tags are simply some scripts that you put into the code of your website that Google will index and then display to users as a search result.

How to Make a Title Tag

As with the Virgin Australia example above, the title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages as the clickable headline and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content.

How to format a title tag

Your Brand Name | Your Primary Keyword | Secondary Keywords | Brand Name

Example from Net a Porter: <title>NET-A-PORTER.COM| Luxury Designer Fashion | Women's designer clothes, shoes, bags, accessories | Net-a-Porter</title>

Hot Tip: Keep your your titles tags under 60 characters so they display in full in search results and when a user shares your URL on social media, and always separate with an '|' like the above example so it's neat and easy to read for users.

How to Make a Meta Description

As we saw with the Virgin Australia example; the meta description is the short paragraph of text placed in the HTML of a web page that describes its content. The meta description will then appear under a page’s URL in the search results.

Example from Net a Porter: <meta name="description" content="Shop designer fashion online at NET-A-PORTER.COM. Designer clothes, designer shoes, designer bags and designer accessories from top designer brands: Christian Louboutin, Matthew Williamson, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs and more..."/>

Hot Tip: Google has stated that meta descriptions are NOT a ranking signal. But, the quality of the description will influence if a 'user' will click-through so it is very important to use this element wisely and with the mindset of what will be helpful for users.

Populate your Meta Tag Template

Now that you have a good understanding of what Meta Tags are, why they are good for SEO and website users and also how to format them - using your free Meta Tag template, start to populate it for your website.

Hot Tip: You have a meta title and meta description for every page on your website. Keep your template as a running log and every-time you create a new page add it to your template and create the tags in the same consistent format.

How to add Meta Tags into you Code

Either provide the below snippets, completed with your own meta info that you did in the template, to your website developer to place into the HTML of your website OR if you are confident and know how - pop it directly into the <head>place code here</head> tags on your website.

<title>insert brand name|primary keyword | keyword, keyword, keyword | brand title</title>

Complete and Continue