Meta tags are the information that you put in your website’s code to help search engines understand what your page is about. The meta tags are found in the section of an HTML web page, and are one of the most important things for search engines, in addition to the content of the web page, when they crawl your website. The two most important meta tags are your title and description tags, and we will go into more detail about these shortly.

In addition to the title and description tags, there are several other important ones including the canonical tag, Open Graph and Twitter Card tags and the robots tag. There are also a number of other meta tags that you may have seen or read about, but which are no longer used, and would probably be best to ignore.

If you want to view the meta tags on a website there are a number of ways you can do this. The easiest is to simply right click on the page and select “view source” or click control+U on your keyboard. You’ll then be able to see the source code of that web page.

The other way to view the meta tags of a website is by using a program such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider. The free version of this excellent piece of software will let you examine 500 pages of a website, which is more than sufficient for many small business websites, which wouldn’t have anywhere close to 500 pages.

With Screaming Frog, you will be presented with a clear overview of the meta tags, as well as lots of other information, of all the pages on a specific site (as long as there are less than 500 – otherwise, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid version of the program).