Meta Tags and Search Engine Optimization

Certain meta tags can help with search engine optimization (SEO), the process of improving search results (quality and quantity) for web pages by search engines.

A <title> tag is certainly important for search results, although it's not technically a <meta> tag (see Changing Topic Titles). As far as meta tags are concerned, different search engines might recognize certain ones (e.g., robots, description, geo) when displaying search results. We recommend you research the meta tags that different search engines support and use the ones that make the most sense for your output.

Example The "description" meta tag is currently used by all major search engines. It might not be used for search rankings by all search engines (e.g., Google does not use it for rankings), but it is still beneficial because it displays in search results and can be useful in driving users to a particular page. Therefore, it's a good idea to add this meta tag with concise, clear text for each topic that you want to be found by web crawlers (see Adding Meta Descriptions for Topics).

Example of description meta tag

On the other hand, the "keywords" meta tag has fallen out of favor and is not really used by search engines anymore.

Note Flare displays the content from the description meta tag in a search results abstract. However, this is supported only when using the MadCap Search engine. It is not currently supported with Elasticsearch.