What are the most important meta tags? An overview

Meta tags are coded in­form­a­tion stored in the head section of an HTML document and serve to provide metadata. They do not appear on the actual webpage but are read by user agents like browsers.

What are HTML meta tags?

HTML meta tags are HTML elements designed to provide ad­di­tion­al in­form­a­tion about a webpage to fa­cil­it­ate the analysis of the HTML file and the man­age­ment of its content. HTML meta tags generally follow a similar structure: first, an element is defined, then content is assigned to it. This results in the following schema for meta in­form­a­tion:

<meta name="Element Name" content="assigned content"/>

While metadata used to play a crucial role in search engine op­tim­isa­tion for HTML pages, their influence on the ranking of Google, Bing, and others is now con­sidered rather low. However, it is still advisable for website operators to maintain the in­form­a­tion in the HTML head and provide detailed meta in­form­a­tion. This is because metasearch engines and local search scripts still find them relevant. Ad­di­tion­ally, meta tags offer the op­por­tun­ity to define in­struc­tions for con­trolling search robots (web crawlers).

Important meta tags

The list of possible elements in the HTML head is long. Besides essential details like the page title, the page de­scrip­tion, and the defin­i­tion of the character set used, the header (the title section of HTML files) offers the pos­sib­il­ity to provide extensive in­form­a­tion for user agents. This allows website operators to define relevant keywords or specify a page theme via meta tags. Ad­di­tion­ally, authors or pub­lish­ers can be named, or copyright in­form­a­tion can be included in the meta tags.

However, not all of this in­form­a­tion is relevant for in­ter­ac­tion with web browsers and search robots. It’s different with meta tags that control the behaviour of user agents by pro­hib­it­ing the indexing of the re­spect­ive HTML page or pre­vent­ing the web crawler from following outgoing links. The following table provides an overview of the most important meta elements:

Title

Strictly speaking, the title is not a meta-element but an in­de­pend­ent HTML tag. Due to its sig­ni­fic­ance for in­ter­ac­tion with user agents, it’s often mentioned in con­nec­tion with meta in­form­a­tion. As a required element in the HTML head, the title is usually placed before all other meta-tags. Read by web browsers, it appears in the title bar of a tab or window, as the default name when setting bookmarks, and in the web browser’s history. Ad­di­tion­ally, all major search engines use the <title> tag as the heading for entries in the search results lists (SERPs). It thus has a sig­ni­fic­ant influence on the click behaviour of internet users during web searching.

A suitable title is essential for a good CTR. As part of on-page op­tim­isa­tion, it should be ensured that the title does not exceed the search engine display length of a maximum of 580 pixels—this is about 50 to 60 char­ac­ters. It is also re­com­men­ded to place the main keyword of a webpage in the <title> tag. For example, the following in­form­a­tion is stored as the title of this webpage:

<title>Overview of HTML Meta Tags - IONOS</title>

Character encoding

If the character set has not already been defined in the HTTP header, you should include this in­form­a­tion via HTML. This prevents, for example, incorrect display of special char­ac­ters in other languages i.e. German umlauts. To specify the character set or encoding, use the following meta tag:

<meta charset="UTF-8"/>

This meta in­form­a­tion becomes relevant when a browser does not receive HTML files via HTTP, but retrieves them directly from the hard drive.

De­scrip­tion

The de­scrip­tion (also called meta de­scrip­tion) provides space for a brief de­scrip­tion of the website’s content. Since this meta tag is often adopted as a snippet in the SERPs by es­tab­lished search engines like Google, Bing, and others, careful editorial pre­par­a­tion is re­com­men­ded. Due to its im­port­ance for click behaviour in web search, the de­scrip­tion is con­sidered one of the most important SEO meta tags.

Website operators should ensure that the de­scrip­tion text does not exceed 920 pixels (about 150 to 160 char­ac­ters). Otherwise, there’s a risk that the excess char­ac­ters will be cut off in the search engine listing. The meta de­scrip­tion should provide a concise and at­tract­ive summary of the page content.

These meta tags you should know! HTML meta tags encode information for browsers and search engines. But which details are truly important?

Author and Copyright

The meta tags author and copyright give website operators the op­por­tun­ity to include in the source code of an HTML page who built the cor­res­pond­ing website and who holds the copyright for the page content. In some content man­age­ment systems (CMS), the author tag is sometimes assigned auto­mat­ic­ally.

<meta name="author" content="Author Name" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright Holder" />

In­struc­tions for web crawlers (bots)

One of the main functions of meta tags is to convey index in­struc­tions to search engine crawlers. These are defined at page level by robots metadata. The following meta tags are used to determine whether a page is added to a search engine index and if it is available for a web search. They can also specify whether outgoing page links should be followed or ignored by the crawler. In this way, meta robot data proves itself to be one of the most relevant kinds of SEO meta tags.

index

To allow the search engine to index an HTML page, use the following meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="index"/>

As the indexing of websites is the standard behaviour of web crawlers (search robots), this in­form­a­tion is generally un­ne­ces­sary.

noindex

• No comments needed.

If an HTML page should not be included in the search engine index, you must ex­pli­citly define this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>

The name attribute robots targets all search engine crawlers. The content attribute noindex contains the in­form­a­tion that indexing is pro­hib­ited. If you want to prevent indexing for specific robots only, you can do so by choosing an al­tern­at­ive name attribute like googlebot.

follow

The standard behaviour of a web crawler includes following the outgoing links of an HTML page. If this is desired, it can be expressed through the following meta-robot spe­cific­a­tion:

<meta name="robots" content="follow"/>

Even this meta tag is es­sen­tially redundant because the crawlers of all major search engines typically follow hy­per­links auto­mat­ic­ally unless otherwise specified.

nofollow

If you want to prevent a search robot from reaching sub­or­din­ate pages of a web presence via hy­per­links or from following ref­er­ences to other domains, you can achieve this with the following meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow"/>

This asks the crawler not to pass PageRank through outgoing links. Until 2019, Google strictly followed this in­struc­tion; since then, it is con­sidered a sug­ges­tion—Google may still follow the links.

The meta tags index/noindex and follow/nofollow can be used in­di­vidu­ally or in com­bin­a­tion. For example, it can be specified that a page may be included in the index, but the hy­per­links should be ignored by the crawler. Al­tern­at­ively, both actions by the search robot can be pro­hib­ited or allowed.

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

HTTP equi­val­ents

Using the http-equiv attribute, meta elements can contain equi­val­ents to in­form­a­tion in the HTTP header. This in­form­a­tion is read, for instance, as a sub­sti­tute if the web server hasn’t been con­figured ac­cord­ingly. The rule is that a same-named HTTP header is preferred over HTML meta tags.

cache-control

To ensure fast Internet operation, it is common for websites to be cached on proxy servers or in the browser cache so that they can be loaded faster on sub­sequent calls. This process can be prevented with the meta tag cache-control with the value no-cache:

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache"/>

Web pages tagged with this meta tag must be reloaded from the web server every time the page is accessed. This slows down page loading, but it can be useful—such as when a website offers con­tinu­ously changing content.

expires

Instead of com­pletely pre­vent­ing caching, you can use the http-equiv attribute to define an ex­pir­a­tion date for the retrieved HTML data. The following meta tag is used for this purpose:

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Expiration time in seconds"/>

HTML pages can be assigned any ex­pir­a­tion date using meta tags. Once the defined time span has elapsed, a web browser is prompted to load the cor­res­pond­ing HTML documents from the original address. If content must always be loaded from the original page, an ex­pir­a­tion time of 0 seconds is chosen. For a 12-hour ex­pir­a­tion time, website operators choose 43,200 seconds.

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0"/>
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="43200"/>

Al­tern­at­ively, any time periods, as well as exact dates and times, can be defined. These must be specified in the in­ter­na­tion­al format and according to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Sat, 07 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT"/>

refresh

Meta tags with the http-equiv attribute offer a way to set up a simple form of re­dir­ec­tion. Similar to the expires tag, the refresh tag defines an ex­pir­a­tion time. Once reached, user agents like web browsers or search engine crawlers are re­dir­ec­ted to a pre­de­ter­mined URL. In the example code, the re­dir­ec­tion takes 10 seconds to the IONOS homepage.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10; url=https://www.ionos.co.uk/"/>

Since the refresh tag is not supported by every web browser, the committee for stand­ard­ising tech­niques on the World Wide Web (World Wide Web Con­sor­ti­um, W3C) re­com­mends a server-side im­ple­ment­a­tion using the HTML status code 301 instead of re­dir­ec­tion via meta tags (as noted in our article ‘The Most Important HTTP Status Codes at a Glance’).

Examples of meta tags in code

Below you will find a code example that rep­res­ents a simple but complete head section of a webpage in HTML. It contains the most relevant meta tags that we have in­tro­duced to you in this article:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<!-- Meta-Tag for the page title -->
<title>Overview of HTML meta tags - IONOS</title>
<!-- Meta-Description  -->
<meta name="description" content="You should know these meta-tags! HTML meta-tags code information for browsers and search engines. But which details are really important?">
<!-- Robots Meta-Tag -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<!-- Meta-Tag for the author of the page -->
<meta name="author" content="John Smith">
<!-- Meta-Tag for copyright -->
<meta name="copyright" content="John Smith 2025">
<!-- Meta-Tag for the cache expiration time (optional) -->
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Sat, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT">
<!-- Meta-Tag to prevent caching -->
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to Our SEO Tips for 2025</h1>
<!-- Content of the page -->
</body>
</html>