There are numerous types of meta tags, all of which have different roles. Not all of them are relevant to search engine optimisation.  For the purposes of this quick guide, we’ve picked out seven of the most important meta tags that are relevant for SEO and search experience optimisation (SXO). 1. Title Tag The title tag appears on SERPs and in browser tabs. The purpose of the title tag is – as the name suggests – to specify the page title. Because the page title is the first information about a page a user sees, it’s important that the title tag encapsulates the topic of the page accurately. This plays a determining factor in whether the user clicks through to the page or not.  2. Meta Description The meta description sums up the content of your web page. Search engines show the meta description in SERPs below the title tag.  It’s best practice to include your focus keyword in the meta description. Including the keyword in the meta description is a relevancy signal for search engines, which can help improve rankings.  Meta descriptions can also impact CTR, which is a key ranking factor. So it’s important that the meta description provides an accurate, enticing summary of the page content. 3. Alt Text Images form a crucial part of many web pages. However, search engine can’t “see” images. Alt text (or the alternative text tag) is a way around that issue. It describes images to search engines so they know how to interpret them and rank them for relevant image search queries.  4. Header Tag Header tags indicate the level of hierarchy of information on the page, with H1 being the most important, main heading and H6 being the least important.  5. Responsive Design Tag The responsive design meta tag (also called the viewport meta element) allows web designers to configure how a page scales according to device. The below example demonstrates how the content on the page adapts and scales according to screen size. 6. Canonical Tag A canonical tag is used when there are several versions of the same web page. By implementing the canonical tag in a page’s code, your website tells search engines that this URL is the main page and that the other pages shouldn’t be indexed. This way, you can prevent problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs. 7. Robots Tag The robots meta tag is placed in the section of your page. The robots tag lets search engines know which pages on your site should be indexed.  Robots tags could be useful when you have some pages on your site that are necessary, but with quite thin content. In this instance, you can use a “noindex” tag to prevent them from appearing in the SERPs. The robots meta tag serves a similar purpose to robots.txt files; it is generally used to prevent a search engine from indexing individual pages. Robots.txt files, on the other hand, will prevent search engines from indexing a whole site or section of a site.