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Let’s first discuss what meta tags are.
Meta tags are HTML elements that are placed in the <Head> section of the web page.
Hidden in a web page’s code, meta tags in seo are snippets of text that describe and manipulate a page’s content.
Their task is to provide search engines with information about the page. They do it by signalling the search engines that this is, in particular, is the meta description and this is the title of the page, and so on.
First and foremost, you will not have any control over the description and title that appear on the search results page.
Lower CTR. Failed first impression. An increase in bounce rates will be a consequence of not adding meta tags to your page’s HTML.
A clear title tag and meta description explicitly tell a user what the page is about, and most searchers, including me, skim through the description to find relevant information.
Now, if you were to leave it on Google’s already burdened shoulders, chances are Google will garble the title and meta description.
Famously known as Title tags, they are the blue clickable links that you see on the SERP.
It is the single most influential factor in establishing the first impression on the searcher.
A title or meta tag is the first thing a user and a crawler encounter before entering the site; hence, the chances of a user and a crawler visiting your page depend on how compelling and accurate your title tag is.
Here’s why an accurate and compelling title tag matters:
How AI in 2025 is changing meta titles (and rankings):
With the advent of AI, Google’s laborious task of changing below-par title tags has become automated.
This leads us to the fact that Google, in 2025, has rewritten 76% of meta titles.
And for you, it means that Google has shifted its priority from keywords to search intent in meta titles.
If you think that keyword-optimized meta titles will do, then your title will become a part of the 76% that Google changes.
Your meta title should be aligned with the search intent of your targeted user. Let’s take a look at a search-intent optimized meta title and one that focuses on keywords:
Meta descriptions are an accurate, concise summary of your webpage’s content that is displayed under the title tag.
Unlike meta titles, meta descriptions don’t directly affect your rankings.
Still, they are important for SEO because they provide extra information about your page, helping searchers in their journey. And what is helpful to searchers is always prioritized by Google.
A convincing meta description tag can drive CTR, as these descriptions are similar to a pitch that convinces users that your page is exactly what they’re looking for.
Write meta descriptions like an ad copy to increase CTR, or like a summary for an informational blog that will help users skim through and get the gist of the whole blog.
Focus on the last point: by adding schema markup to your page, you provide more context to both users and search engines.
For example, if your page is a blog page, you can add an article schema to display crucial information, such as the author's name or the publication date.
Robots meta tags control how search engines crawl and index your webpages.
It is a directive tool that gives you total control over how search engines interact with each page. This includes whether a piece of content should appear in the AI snippet, get indexed, followed, etc.
Here are the key robots meta tag directives:
Other than these, there are several other directives, such as “index,follow”, “noindex,follow”, “none”, “noarchive”, etc.
These directives might seem excessive and jumbled, but they allow you to control every minor to major aspect of your site and how it interacts with search engines.
A warning, the robots meta tags are one of the most influential tags that, if implemented ignorantly, could cause catastrophic damage to your pages.
God forbid, confusing as they are, if you mistakenly place a noindex directive instead of an index directive, your page will fade away from the SERP like it never existed before.
It tells crawlers how to scale and display a webpage across different devices with different screen sizes, like a tablet, monitor, or smartphone.
Without the viewport meta tag, Google will display pages in the default desktop width, which will forcefully scale down and tear the pixels on screens smaller than 980 px, worsening the UX of your page.
If you are not using this tag, you are missing out on over 61.5% of search traffic, which comes from mobile devices.
And Google doesn’t prefer pages that are not mobile-friendly, and to protect its users from bad experiences, it flags them as non-mobile-friendly.
So, to attract mobile users, ensure that your <head> contains the Meta Viewport Tag.
To check whether your site has it or not, use Bing’s mobile-friendly test tool.
A canonical tag is a piece of HTML code that specifies the preferred version of a web page to search engines.
It is written as:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://mystore.com/" />
It is placed inside the <head> section of the HTML. When you add this tag to a page, you are sending a message to the search engines, “Use this URL in search results instead of the duplicates.”
On a duplicate or alternative page, you might add:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mystore.com/shoes/” />
This indicates that https://mystore.com/shoes/ is the master page.
To make the job easier for search crawlers. Crawlers can only evaluate a limited number of pages of your site, and duplicate pages force search crawlers to re-evaluate and rank them, wasting their precious time and resources.
Not to mention the poor user experience that duplicate pages create. Google, to satisfy users’ search intent, shows and ranks diverse sites to answer the query. Hence, when a site contains multiple pages with similar content to manipulate rankings, Google punishes it with penalties.
For example:
By adding a canonical tag, you inform search crawlers which page should be ranked and avoided, or you can add a noindex robots tag to abandon the duplicate page altogether.
It’s also worth noting that canonical tags are merely hints for search engines, not hard redirects.
Search engines may still choose to ignore a canonical tag if they believe another URL is more relevant than the master page. It’s a rare occurrence, but it happens nonetheless.
We use the heading tag to indicate the heading hierarchy of a webpage, which begins from the largest, the H1, to the smallest, H6.
A Header tag basically organizes the content of a webpage, making it convenient for the crawlers to understand and display relevant information on the SERP.
Whether their presence or absence affects the rankings or not is up for debate.
But they are of importance as they signal that the H1, in specific, is the topic, H2 is the subtopic, and H3 is the sub-subtopic, allowing users to consume the content easily along with bots.
Yes, if you care for the comfort of your audience.
No, if you don’t want to add another task to the heap
Other than that, don’t stuff your headings with keywords; it might seem logical, but it can backfire quickly when users start bouncing off the page due to confusion.
The meta charset tag signals the search engine which character encoding to use while rendering the page.
Character encoding in the context of meta charset is simply a “translation table” that indicates to a web browser how to display the bytes of data in your HTML as readable characters.
Now, there are a plethora of character sets, but the two most prominent are:
This small code is of great importance: <meta charset="UTF-8">
What happens without it?
Until now, we’ve read how beneficial and useful meta tags are; now, let’s take a peek at the meta tags that have the potential to damage your cherished SEO in 2025.
Although if implemented ignorantly or carelessly, any meta tag could topple all your SEO efforts almost instantly.
The tags I’m about to mention are those whose mere presence in the HTML could spell trouble.
The oldest and the first meta tag in the history of SEO books: Meta keywords tag, aka the abandoned Meta tag.
This tag got abused by webmasters so badly for ranking benefits that Google had to disregard it as a ranking factor in 2009.
To outrank, what SEO-experts simply had to do was populate the <head> with keywords relevant to the search query.
For example, if I were a blogger in mid-2007 trying to ride the hype of the new Apple iPhone, all I had to do was stuff anything that resonated with the band name, product name, and potential queries, and my blog would’ve had a fair chance at ranking in the top 5.
And the <head> would’ve looked something like this:
If you have the itch to know what harm it could do, if implemented today, then proceed (with caution)
Rather than stuffing keywords, put more emphasis on keyword research. Search for long-tail keywords and terms that are relevant to your targeted users’ search queries.
Focus on placing keywords smartly in the title tag and meta description to signal relevance to search engines.
With all those tips, keep in mind that Google in 2025, unlike in 2007, prioritizes original and insightful content over mere keywords.
Among the fallen meta tags, this tag got replaced by the 301 and 302 redirects because spammers severely exploited it to redirect innocent users to spammy or malicious sites.
Spammers weaponized it by embedding the tag in normal, harmless-looking pages that ranked for a legitimate query, but as soon as the user visited the page, the meta refresh tag redirected them after a set number of seconds to potentially dangerous sites that pissed users off.
To protect its precious user experience, Google, by the mid-2000s, gradually pushed the meta refresh tag under the carpet, warned webmasters not to use it, and eventually flagged it as spam.
Yes. It does, and with the same potency.
While this tag was really helpful for sites that posted frequent updates and required reloads to display them, such as news pages and auction sites, it was infamously used to reload pages with ads on them, which frustrated the users.
Instead of the meta refresh tag, use the 301 or 302 redirect to remain on the safe side of the search engines. These are the SEO-friendly ways to redirect users and crawlers from one URL to another without incurring penalties and spoiling the UX.
As SEO transforms, its consideration of meta tags also changes, which turns a few obsolete and some extremely crucial. I’ll keep it short because they’re as good as a stale tea:
Let’s revise what meta tags in seo are, and do you remember what the most important meta tag for seo is? Or the one that can jeopardise your whole site?
Don’t worry, I’m not conducting any test. You can always scroll up to find meta tags meaning or any other meta tag information you need because meta tags are, without a doubt, a complex element of the SEO family, and they require constant reiteration to implement them mistake-free.
If you'd like to expand your SEO horizons further, feel free to explore my other in-depth blogs.
