A meta tag is a line of HTML coding that contains metadata or information about a webpage. Meta tag information doesn’t change how the page looks; it won’t be seen by the website viewer, unless they are viewing your source code. There are two common types of meta tags — meta description tags and meta keywords tags.
Meta description tags describe, in some way, the webpage.
Both types of tags are located in the heading section of your HTML code and usually below the title. You might have the following heading for your webpage:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>How to Create a Meta Tag</TITLE>
<META name =“description” content=”Everything you want to know about Meta Tags”>
<META name =”keywords” content=”meta, meta tags, meta tag, HTML and meta tags, tags, SEO”>
</HEAD>
The purpose of meta tags is to inform ‘spiders, bots or web crawlers‘ about your page. They existed before search engines, but today, they are primarily used in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). Using them may help spiders more easily index your pages in search engines, but, not all web crawlers or robots pay attention to these tags anymore. Some still do though, and may increase the likelihood of your page coming up as a choice when people search under alternate but related names to your content.