The holographic methods inspired by the gauge/gravity correspondence from
string theory have been actively applied to the hadron spectroscopy in the last fifteen years. Within the phenomenological bottom-up approach, the linear Regge-like trajectories for light mesons are naturally reproduced in the so-called “soft-wall” holographic models. We give a short review of the underlying ideas and technical aspects related to the meson spectroscopy and present a generalized variant of soft-wall model that is convenient for description of real experimental data in meson spectroscopy.