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Meta tags are elements in HTML code that provide Google and other search engines with information about an HTML document or a website. Essentially, they are summary details about a page's content and how search engines should index the website. Therefore, they are relevant in the context of search engine optimization.
Meta tags can be created for each HTML document individually in the Content Management System (CMS) or entered in the source code using HTML tags (from computer science: "marking" of a data set). While the entry in the CMS works very simply via an input form, one should have the appropriate knowledge when dealing with the source code. Such an HTML specification might look as follows:
<title>Meta Tags and Their Importance for Ranking</title>
The most important meta tags for SEO at a glance
Meta-Description
A very important meta tag for SEO, even if it doesn't directly affect the ranking. The meta description is a description of the expected content, essentially a summary of the subpage—ideally appealingly formulated with a call to action. The description should also preferably include the focus keyword. The goal is to spark user interest in content and generate traffic to the site.
Title
Strictly speaking, the title tag is not purely a technical meta tag. However, since it is displayed by the browser and also appears in conjunction with the description in the search result lists (SERPs) of search engines, the page title should be specified. Furthermore, the search engine Google uses the title tag for ranking web pages. Accordingly, the title of a page should also contain the primary keyword.
Robots
The Robot Meta Tag provides important information about the indexing of web pages. With this, the webmaster can exclude individual pages (Index/NoIndex) as well as specific links (Follow/NoFollow) from being included in the index. These instructions are communicated to the crawler (such as the Googlebot). Relatively new attributes that act as indicators for the web crawler are the sponsored and ugc Meta Tags. The sponsored attribute can be used to mark links acquired through link buying. The ugc tag denotes links posted by users on a website (User Generated Content), such as in the comments of blogs.
Meta data: Their impact on ranking and users
Since meta tags provide search engines with information that is relevant to the website's ranking, the HTML specifications play an important role in search engine optimization. When creating meta tags like title and description, not only the correct position of the keyword is important, but also the number of characters or words, among other things.
Not every meta-tag is significant solely for search engines. In particular, the information in the Title and Description influences the CTR, the click-through rate, because they are listed in the snippets that appear in the results list for a search query. The more consistent this information is with the search query, the higher the click-through rate, which in turn impacts the ranking of a website. A meta-tag like the description is therefore also valuable, even though it does not directly affect a page's position.
As a meta tag no longer relevant: the meta keywords
In the past, meta keywords were also important meta tags for SEO. However, because they invited massive manipulation, Google increasingly acted against them. Nowadays, they are meaningless for search engine optimization. Although they do not affect a page's ranking, they can still be used on the website to display related articles to the user.