The Importance of Meta Tags in Search Engine Optimization: Setting a foundation for optimization of your website pages starts with the implementation of meta tags, which play an important role in SEO. These tags, added in the header of your web pages, use syntax which Google can understand to describe your content.
However, as fundamental as meta tags are, the best practices with them have always been a secondary SEO activity. Indeed, content and links are sometimes more essential to deal with, leaving you to feel that there isn’t any time or attention to spend on meta tags. But this is simply shortsighted since optimizing these correctly could greatly boost how Google sees your page.
For example, a well-thought-out meta description will seriously help in SERP, increasing the CTR and overall performance of the site. This means it is still worth including some important meta tags, and how effective their use turns out to be depends on your approach.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are HTML elements that provide information about a website. Search engines use them to comprehend the contents and their relation to what a user has entered as their search query. They are, otherwise stated, the HTML elements that provide information about a web page for the search engines and visitors to the site. They go in the head of the HTML code and are not seen on the actual page.
While visitors do not see the meta tags, they would still play a very key role in determining the ranking of your site on the search results pages. One of the most important meta tags provides the page title, visible as a clickable link in the top of the snippet.
There are many types of meta tags, but some of the most commonly used include the title tag, description tag, keyword tag, robots tag, and canonical tag.
The meta description is the important tag that is utilized to describe a page in a few words; it usually shows below the page title in SERP. For example, if one searches about any product-computer, the snippet below the page title shows the description about the product provided by the manufacturer.
Getting Started With Meta Tags
Meta tags are a part of the site audit report that goes in the head of a webpage. They provide information about the content of a page and its motive. The main purpose for which meta tags are used is to provide extra detail about any product or service.
For instance, the keywords meta tag can be used to identify the keywords in the description of a product or service that include price range, features, and size. A location meta tag can be used to specify the geographical location of a website.
Similarly, a category meta tag can be used in blog posts to enable readers to find related content. The above examples depict how meta tags can be used to extend information about a webpage. Meta tags have several types: title, description, keyword, image alt text, robots, language, and schema markup amongst others.
However, the focus of this article is primarily on the most common tags, which are the description and keyword tags.
Importance of Meta Tags in SEO
While meta tags are very important to SEO but not as important as content or links, their optimization is essential for any success of optimization.
A good title tag may decide the difference between a well-performing and poorly performing webpage. On the opposite end, not filling meta tags out may cause Google to pull what it considers top tags on a page.
With that, Google’s algorithm sometimes can become a bit blind-sighted and will settle for something less than perfect.
In order not to leave the choice of meta tags up to Google’s algorithm, it is important that a physical page title and description are included for your webpage.
Page Title Tags
The page title tag is one of the most important descriptive elements of a webpage, which every viewer sees as the site approaches through the Google search results. So, the title should show what exactly the page will contain.
For instance, when creating a blog, the title needs to be precisely what the post is about so that individuals who read it know what page they are on and what they have read.
Some sites have high ranking despite poor title tags while others seem to just completely disregard the need for optimization of the tags. This could simply be due to the type of site as some are video dominant, text dominant, some cover a little bit of everything and others could be niche dominant.
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There are so many reasons that a website might not focus on optimising their title tags, but a great title tag can make the difference when it comes to how Google perceives your webpage and its ranking.
If you’re building a new site, the SEO of your title tag may be pretty far down the priority list, but as you begin to gain visitors, you need to focus on metrics such as your bounce and conversion rates.
These will help you track and decide whether the title tag is actually helping or hindering the performance of your site, and in which way to tune it up for better results.
“Page title,” according to Google’s Search Essentials documentation: “Best practice will ensure that good page title optimization influences the search result effectively.”
Best Practices for Page Title Optimization
- It is very important to make sure that each page on your website has a proper title tag with a specified page title.
- According to Google’s recommendation, page titles should be both descriptive and concise. For instance, using vague titles such as “Home” for the home page or “Profile” for a person’s profile should be avoided. Long and wordy text is also not advisable since it will most likely be truncated in the search results.
- Don’t use boilerplate text and repetitive paragraphs of text that have absolutely nothing to do with the differences in pages. It’s a good idea to avoid boilerplate or repeated text; try to use unique and descriptive titles for each page. Long text which doesn’t differ between pages, except some snippets, is also discouraged in Google guidelines. Use the least but most effective amounts of text in your titles.
- While the use of descriptive terms is permitted in the page title, Google doesn’t favor keyword stuffing. To say more precisely, the repetition of some catchwords and phrases might look spammy for Google and users too. Better avoid such practices and try to keep a reasonable balance between keyword usage and overall descriptive value.
- Branding of the page title is OK by Google’s standards. It can go at the front or the end, but it should be separated and distinct from the rest of the title. Use some kind of delimiter symbol, such as colons, pipes, or hyphens. This stops your site’s branding from looking like it’s part of the repetition of the page title.
Other practices that are highly recommended
- Mark your main title unequivocally. Google indicates the various sources you can use in generating the title link, such as the main visual title, prominent body copy text, and the heading elements. It’s also important to use the size variation of the main title on the page for prominence.
- According to Google’s recommendations, it’s good to have your page title exactly match the content of your page. If your title and primary content on the page don’t exactly match, then Google can select other text to appear as the link for that page title. To eliminate any possibility of this happening, make sure that the same page title is placed in the <h1> tag. This can help make it consistent and perhaps prevent Google from rewriting your title on the search engine results page.
Meta Description Tags
The meta description tag is another important element for SEO. It is a short paragraph that appears below the page title in search results. If you provide a better and more concise description than what is available on the page, Google may use it.
While this meta tag doesn’t influence the ranking much, it does help a lot with appeal to the user and inform the user about the page.
This tag summarizes in a short summary what’s on the webpage; it should be short and to the point. In essence, this is the sales copy that sells your website to users as meeting their needs.
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According to Google, there is no clear cut length limit for the meta description tag. Yet, it might truncate the snippet in the SERPs depending on the width of the device where it will appear.
Meta Descriptions Writing Best Practices
Although SEOs may consider themselves to have little in the way of controlling the rankings, writing meta descriptions is still a vital tactic. The difference between ok and awful CTRs often comes right down to the meta description.
For that reason, it’s a good idea to focus your efforts on optimizing page titles and meta descriptions to help give your SEO a push. Google’s Search Essentials has recommendations for what makes a great meta description.
That means it’s important that meta descriptions be visible on the webpage, because otherwise, Google tends to ignore them 99% of the time.
Use Different Meta Descriptions on Your Website
Google also describes that having similar or duplicate meta descriptions on various numbers of pages on a site is not useful when different pages of that site appear on the SERPs. But recommended to write unique and accurate meta-descriptions about what is on each particular page: For the main home page or aggregation use page-site level description and page-level description in all other types of pages.
Use Relevant Information about your content in your Description
Google guidelines say that the meta description should contain relevant information about the content on the page. In news articles and blog posts, the meta description can contain the name of the author, the date of publication, and byline information that is not visible.
Similarly, on product pages, any key information scattered through the page that is helpful for users can easily be included in the meta description.
Google stresses how an effective meta description can make sure all information is available so that the user can make an immediate decision to view or not to view a page.
Automatic Generation of Meta Description
According to Google’s Search Essentials documentation, it is OK to actually encouraged for web pages to have programmatically generated meta descriptions. This works best on bigger sites where there could be hundreds of pages.
While Google doesn’t expect every user to craft these meta descriptions manually for such sites, it still encourages making sure the generated descriptions are diverse and readable.
It’s highly recommended to avoid creating low-quality descriptions with too much keyword stuffing, as this will negatively affect your site’s SEO performance.
Use High-Quality Meta Descriptions
Google’s guidelines go a long way to clearly outline that meta descriptions should be of high quality and actually describe the content of a webpage. The meta descriptions must be highly informative and of good quality.
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How to add a Meta Robots Tag to the Page
The meta robots tag makes it possible for you to take control over the indexing and crawling of your web pages. This means that it’s a much more specific method of page-level indexation control than others.
Of course, this setting can only be acknowledged and acted upon provided the page in question is accessible and crawlable by Google.
Just beware of the mistake of assuming a performance from allowing a page to be excluded via disallowing it and noindexing the page. Although there could be occasions when Google ignores this kind of rule in robots.txt, it’s just right that most times, the page is actually crawlable and indexable, allowing Google to correct the rule.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html><head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> (…) </head> <body>(…)</body> </html>
Adding the meta robots tag to your pages can be done using the code snippet above. It should be placed between the opening and closing head tags at the top of the page code structure.
How to add a Meta Viewport Tag to a Page
The meta viewport tag is a crucial component of the meta tags added to a webpage, and it helps to ensure that the site is designed with full responsiveness.
In essence, this meta tag offers explicit guidelines to the browser regarding how to display the webpage on a mobile device, and it also signals to Google that the page is optimized for mobile viewing.
Viewport Settings
It is generally recommended to include the viewport meta tag on all pages that should be optimized for mobile devices. This tag’s parameters control the page’s dimensions and scaling attributes.
Typically, mobile browsers initially render a page at the width of a desktop screen, which is around 980px minimum, but can vary depending on the device. Then, they adjust the content to fit the screen and increase font sizes for better visibility. However, this may result in inconsistent font sizes for different users. To address this issue, one can use a system font instead.
The provided screenshot demonstrates how to add and configure the meta viewport tag in your code.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> … <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> </head>
How to add Meta Charset Tag to Web Page
The meta tag for charset is the most important thing to define in your page, as it defines the character encoding of your page. It’s a medium for browsers to output characters as text.
If this tag is not present, the browser may show scrambled or unintelligible text because it doesn’t understand what the input text is. Therefore, this tag is necessary to make sure that your page appears perfectly in different browsers and platforms.
The meta tag for charset may not make much difference in SEO ranking factors. However, it is a must-have if you want your page to work without problems on different browsers and platforms.
This can result in browsers displaying gibberish text because of a lack of interpretation of the input text. The HTML5 specification uses UTF-8 character encoding by default, but if you need to use a different encoding for your page, adding this charset meta tag is a good idea.
No Sitelinks Search Box Meta Tag
Are you aware that you can control the display of your search results by using certain meta tags?
One of these meta tags is the “no sitelinks search box” tag:
<meta name=“google” content=“nositelinkssearchbox”>
If you prefer not to have a sitelinks search box visible on the Google SERPs, you can use the nositelinkssearchbox meta tag to remove it. To implement this tag on specific pages, follow these steps:
Once more, you will need to include this meta tag between the opening and closing head tags of your webpage.
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For Google Discover
By adding a straightforward meta tag, you can increase clicks from Google Discover by 300%. Here is the corresponding code snippet:
“<meta name=’robots’ content=’max-image-preview:large’ />”
Meta Tags Are An Important Part Of SEO
Some experts believe that meta tags are not the most important aspect of optimizing web pages and may rank lower in importance compared to other factors. However, optimizing your meta tags can sometimes give you an advantage in achieving higher rankings. While they should not be the sole focus of your SEO efforts, they can still be valuable when used correctly.
It is important to keep your meta tags up to date and reflective of the content on your page. Having subpar meta tags can also be detrimental to your optimization efforts. Ultimately, paying attention to optimizing these tags can elevate a mediocre page to a great one. Hire an Internet marketing service London to help you rank on the first page of SERP.
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