How to use metatags for SEO?

From the beginning of website creation and especially in SEO expertise, metatags have been highly important when it comes to building a site as well as shaping an SEO strategy. However, things change quickly in the digital marketing world, and what was once helpful may not be as effective today.

In this article, we will cover everything about metatags for SEO and explain why you should still use them, even if some marketers suggest otherwise.

What are meta tags?

Metatags are snippets of HTML placed in a webpage's <head> section that provide descriptive information about the page's content to search engines and browsers, helping determine how it appears in search results without being directly visible to users. These snippets are typically used to specify character set, page description, keywords, author of the document, and viewport settings; they are like a translation of the visual part of your content for search engines and browsers to understand how a page or post is structured and how it should be indexed, displayed, and interpreted across different devices and platforms.

There are multiple types of meta tags that can be used to specify the structure of the content (titles, body of text, images, etc.), the information that should be displayed on search engines (metadescription, metatitle, etc.), or to control how browsers and crawlers interact with the page (such as robots tags, canonical links, and viewport settings), ultimately helping improve SEO, user experience, and content accessibility across devices.

How do metatags for SEO work?

As mentioned above, metatags are used for SEO purposes as they give information to search engines and browser about the content structure and how to interact with it. With metatags, we are able to translate the content to a language search engines understand so they can decide whether a page or blog post deserve to be ranked or not. These snippets of HTML are essential as they help with:

Visibility in search results and influence on click-through rates: Metadata shapes how pages appear in search engine results, determining what users see before they ever visit a website. Clear, relevant information helps search engines display pages accurately and encourages users to click when the result aligns with their intent.
Content structure and presentation: Metadata helps define the hierarchy and organization of a page, making it easier for search engines to understand the relationship between different pieces of content. A well-structured page is also easier for users to scan, navigate, and consume.
Guidance for search engine crawlers: Metadata provides instructions on how search engines should interact with a page, such as whether it should be indexed or how its links should be treated. This allows website owners to control how content is discovered and processed.
Support for accessibility: Metadata plays a key role in making content accessible by providing text-based alternatives for visual elements. This ensures that users relying on assistive technologies can fully understand and interact with the content.
Management of duplicate content: Metadata helps clarify which version of a page should be considered the primary one when similar content exists across multiple URLs. This prevents confusion for search engines and ensures ranking signals are consolidated correctly.

In brief, metatags for SEO work as translators: they make website content understandable to search engines by providing context, structure, and guidance on how pages should be interpreted, indexed, and presented in search results.

Are metatags still useful?

Yes, they are, but if we are completely honest, some metatags are not as useful as they were. Nowadays, metatags like metakeywords, for example, are completely obsolete as stated by Google or Bing long time ago. However, there are still a lot of them that can be useful in 2026.

These days, search engines like Google that the metatags that they support regarding indexing are the following:

description: this metatag is used to provide a short description of the page and it can be sometimes used in the snippet shown in search results.
robots and google bot: as explained by Google, this metatags "control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing." They are used to guide search engines on which pages should be discovered, indexed, or followed, giving site owners control over how their content appears in search results. When publishing a site, the default setting typically allows search engines to crawl and index all pages (<index> and <follow>), but using these tags strategically helps prevent sensitive, duplicate, or low-value pages from being included in search results. This metatags should be used in a more strategically way than others listed here. To ensure your robots directives are working properly, try our Robots.txt Analyzer.
notranslate: some search engines, like Google, can identify a user's native language and automatically translate a site if its language differs from the user's. Using this meta tag prevents Google from providing automatic translation, which can be helpful for multilingual sites.
nopagereadatloud: blind and low vision users use screen readers to access websites that have enabled Google's Google-Read-Aloud user agent, with this metatag you avoid this service from from reading aloud web pages using text-to-speech (TTS).
google-site-verification: this metatag is used to verify ownership for Search Console. Placed on the most important page of your site (normally the homepage), this metatag will allow you to implement, access and use Search Console. If you are marketer you already know this, as Search Console is a crucial tool, but we can't overlook this metatag, which remains essential for managing how search engines interact with your site.
content type and charset: this metatagas define the page's content type (if it's a page, a section, a blog post, etc.) and character set respectively (in other words, the character format, for example, UTF-8). This information helps search engines correctly interpret and display your content, ensuring that text renders properly across different browsers and devices.
refresh: based on some article, this tag is not useful nowadays for being bad for SEO and accessibility, but Google still list it as useful in GoogleSearchCentral. The refresh metatags is used like a redirection as it redirects users to a new URL after a certain amount of time. As mentioned by other marketers, this is not the best metatag in any way because it is actually bad UX and accessibility-wise. If this happens to any of your URLs, we recommend making a 301 redirect.
viewport: this metatag tells browsers how to control a page's dimensions and scaling on different devices. It helps Google determine whether a site is mobile-friendly, which is crucial since the majority of users now access the web via smartphones. Ensuring proper responsiveness not only improves user experience but also impacts search rankings, as mobile-friendliness is a key factor in Google's algorithm.
rating: this metatag is more like a label to rate the SafeSearch pages. It's like the "Parental Advisory" label but for websites instead of music; with this label you can help Google identify if your content is sexually-explicit adult content easily.

However, even though Google only mentions the metatags listed above as the useful ones, they are not the only ones worth using. In addition to the tags recommended, we also emphasize incorporating the following:

Content structure: as mentioned above and throughout the article, the metatags used for structuring the content like heading, body, bullet points tags, etc. are also essential.
Schema markup: probably the most important one as we have already told you in our article about schema markup. Even though it's not actually considered a metatag, it actually is as it's as it is an HTML snippet that provides search engines with additional context about your content.By adding schema, you can explicitly define elements such as products, reviews, events, articles, FAQs, recipes, etcetera. This way of clarifying what is your content increases the chances of your pages appearing as rich results (rich snippets), such as star ratings, prices, event dates, breadcrumbs, or FAQ dropdowns directly in the search results.
Alt text: Alt text is becoming increasingly important as website accessibility regulations expand across the U.S. and Europe (we will talk about this, promise). It plays a critical role in accessibility by helping blind and low-vision users understand images through screen readers. Alt text also benefits SEO, as search engines cannot "see" images and rely on text-based HTML descriptions to interpret their content. That's because adding this metatag is quite crucial as you are helping search engines but also people to access your content in an understandable way.

As you can see, this metatags are related to SEO but also to technical stuff as well as accessibility features. For example, the <nopagereadatloud>, as mentioned before, is meant to prevent screen readers to read an excerpt or an entire page out loud. This can be quite helpful when implementing accessibility to your site if you find elements being redundant or unnecessary to be read for a user. For example, imagine that an article with multiple images which only serve as visual purpose but don't give any key information. To avoid the screen reader to 'interrupt' the reading, you can tag the images with this metatag. This will improve user experience and won't affect the images from being crawled.

Are meta keywords important for SEO?

Yes, they are, in fact, important for both SEO and AIEO. We have already discussed the multiple uses and different metatags supported by Google, but what's particularly interesting is that AI also finds metatags useful. Among the metatags you should implement for your AIEO strategy are:

There's no need to explain why this first batch of metatags is important, as they serve the same purposes as for SEO, but we've listed them here to ensure you don't forget to implement them:

Content structure related metatags
Metadescription and metatitle
Schema Markup
Robots metatag
Canonical metatags
Viewport metatag

Besides the mentioned, there's one that haven't been mentioned yet in the article that serves a great purpose on your AIEO strategy: open graph and twitter cards. These tags control how your content appears on social media platforms, ensuring posts display correctly with images, titles, and descriptions. Since AI retrieves information from social networks to be used as results, these metatags can quite helpful to enhance your AIEO strategy as they provide structured, machine-readable data that helps AI crawlers discover your content. You can verify your Open Graph and Twitter Card implementation with our Metadata Checker.

How to write SEO metatags?

If you want to implement the mentioned metatags in your site, there are a couple of way to do it depending on which metatag is to be implemented. The three main ways to edit the metatags mentioned in this article are:

Manual Coding (HTML): the hardest way is doing manually. By creating a plain text doc and creating the coding of your site you can implement there all the metatags you want. There are some cases that this is the only way of doing it, for example, when you need full control over advanced or custom meta tags that are not supported by CMS interfaces or SEO plugins. This approach is common for custom-built websites, web applications, or highly technical SEO implementations, where developers directly edit the <head> section of the HTML. However, while manual coding offers maximum flexibility, it also carries a higher risk of errors and usually requires solid knowledge of HTML and SEO best practices; that's why we ONLY recommend doing this if you know how to do it. Avoid rookie mistakes.
Using a CMS: this is the most common way as nowadays everyone edits their site with a CMS in which you can implement metatags easily. Most content management systems (such as WordPress, Shopify, Wix, or HubSpot) provide native options to edit essential meta tags like the title tag, meta description, and sometimes robots meta tags. This method is more user-friendly and suitable for website owners who want to manage SEO without touching code. However, built-in CMS options may be limited and not always allow advanced customization. But, remember, don't touch the code manually if you don't know how to do it even though you need it…
Using an SEO tool: other tools that offer an easy way to implement meta tags are SEO tools. In this case, these tools only allow you to implement certain meta tags, as their name suggests, only those that are SEO-related, such as title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags, robots directives, and sometimes structured data. Some of the most used SEO tools for this goal are Yoast SEO, Rank Math or All in One SEO, but there are a lot available.

As you can see, the method you choose depends on your website's structure, technical expertise, and SEO requirements. Manual coding is best for full control and custom setups, CMS settings work well for basic needs, and SEO plugins or SEO tools are ideal for simplifying and scaling meta tag optimization. But remember, you have to be careful when implementing meta tags, as those that cannot be added using assisted tools and must be implemented manually can be quite tricky. We recommend that even if you need to add them manually, if you don't know how to do it, don't do it, or you may end up with a site full of errors that won't benefit SEO in any way. As you've read here, technical aspects are key. Once you've implemented your metatags, use our SEO Analyzer to verify everything is configured correctly.