Meta Tags: You Need to Know for SEO

Learn how to use meta tags for SEO, including the page title and meta description tags. Best practices, implementation, and more. 

Meta tags are the short intro of a webpage. It tells shortly what the page is about and what information you will get from it.

It is a fundamental part of SEO, so make sure meta details are well-optimized so that search engines can understand and relate the intent of your webpage with the user query.

These tags are added to your page’s header to describe the page syntax that search engines understand. When it comes to SEO, some people need to give it priority and move on to the next step.

Sometimes, things like content and links can take more importance than things like meta tags. It is understandable, as content and links may be more critical.

Make sure you have used these tags properly. Tags are the preeminent way to convince Google about the webpage.

For example, see a good-performing website and a poor-performing website, they both rank well, but a good-quality meta description attracts more people and the click-through rate (CTR) of the site increases.

Make sure you include essential meta tags to get results.

What Are Meta Tags?

Meta tags provide information about the website in the HTML of the page.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Edge and others use these codes to determine what the page is about and how it will be relevant to the user’s queries.

However, search engines can read this code, meaning this data is not visible to website visitors. Therefore, meta descriptions play an important role in determining page ranking.

Meta details include title, description, and focus keywords—meta Title: The blue line that appears at the top of the snippet in the search result.

Meta Description: It’s a Precious tag for Search Engines and visitors Because it describes the page.

For example, someone is searching for a Digital Marketing Company. In this case, the snippet of the Digital Marketing company-related web page appears with the title and description of the search engine result.

Getting Started With Meta Tags

Meta-tags are the first important point you see in a site audit report. It appears in the header above the page content and provides information about a webpage.

Before getting into what meta tags do, we must know why we use them.

You want to let people know the location of the website where you provide services. You can add information about the business, like city name, state or country and add all these details by location meta tag.

If you write a blog, You use category meta tags and keywords in your blogs so that other people can find them.

You aspire to include product size, features and service prices related words in the meta description.

These were just a few examples of the type of tags you can add to the description according to your requirements.

Different types of meta tags are an essential part of search engines, which means that meta tags must be optimized properly in order to get commendable results.

Meta tags include title, description, keyword, Image alt tag, language, robots, schema markup and other meta tags. In this article, we are focusing on the most important meta things, especially descriptions and keywords.

Why Meta Tags Are Important For SEO

Meta tags are the most important tags in SEO. However, it is a brief of your website. Hence it becomes necessary that you optimize it properly.

A good title means a big difference between the success or failure of a webpage.

Empty meta tag means (such as a blank title or meta description) you give access to optimize your meta details according to their algorithm, and it is possible that search engines may not optimize according to you. However, it would be a good move if you optimize your meta description yourself.

Meta Title Tags 

The Meta title tag is the main element for defining a page and first visible part of your website that appears on the search engine result pages.

Hence, the meta title should be optimized appropriately, as it reflects the page’s content. If you’re writing service page or blog content, ensure your page title accurately reflects the post content.

Although some sites are ranking well in spite of having poor meta titles and description tags, they do not care much about it.

But why don’t some sites put more effort into the meta description? 

It depends on the site. Some websites focus on their content, and others focus on elements such as images, videos and rich text.

There are several reasons. However, Meta details like Title and Description are the best determining factor to understanding your page. 

If you’re starting a new site, you won’t need to worry about SEO efforts on your title and description tag. However, you have to worry about bounce and conversion rates, which you can track once you get traffic to the site.

By tracking those metrics, you can decide which title tags are affecting your performance and where to go to optimize it better.

Best practices:

• Stick to a 55-character limit
• Be specific but concise
• Incorporate relevant power words
• Make it interesting
• Make the keyword/keyphrase obvious

What to avoid: 

• Not creating a page title
• Making your meta titles too short and incomplete
• Overreaching 60 characters
• Keyword stuffing
• Not connecting your title to the main content

Meta Description Tags  

Another family member of meta tags is a description tag.

It is a short paragraph of about 150 to 160 characters. This short snippet paragraph appears beneath the page title. However, it is not used to rank a webpage. 

Meta-description is used to attract users and inform them about the page.

The meta description is the summary of the webpage. It tells what type of content will get in it and what it is about; in simple words, a meta description is a sales tone for a website. 

This means you can assure users that your page is exactly what they are looking for and can lead them to the website.

Google explains that meta description has no estimated length, and you can optimize that according to the snippet. However, according to SEO, the meta description characters should be between 150 to 160. 

If your description length exceeds 160 characters, Further description will not appear in the snippet. 

Best Techniques For Writing Meta Descriptions

A meta description is an essential weapon that SEO professionals never forget to use. So yes, it is true that meta description is an important part of SEO to get a better ranking. 

This means the difference between a significant CTR from SERPs as opposed to a sub-standard CTR.

Whenever you optimize the meta title and description of a webpage, make sure that it describes that webpage, And it should be attractive so that your CTR increases.

Note: This is an important tag; meta descriptions should appear on search engine result pages. If they are not, Google will ignore them.

Make sure every web page has a unique description.

Google can not relate your web page content with a specific keyword when it gets the same meta description for website pages.

So google suggests that meta descriptions should be unique with targeted keywords and must describe precisely every specific page.

Make sure your description retains relevant information regarding the content.

Google says that the meta description should include relevant information that tells what your actual page is about.

A good meta-description provides all the relevant information a user is looking for, and they visit your site after seeing your meta-description.

Make sure the meta description is user-friendly and human-readable. Means don’t use meta descriptions created programmatically. This can create a low-quality description.

How To Add A Meta Robots Tag To Your Page

Meta robots tag allows you to index (crawl) your pages. In simple words, If a website is not ready to index or you want to make changes in indexing pages, you can prevent search engine crawlers from indexing by placing a meta robot tag.

A web page can be read by a search engine when it allows, and no-indexing means the search engine cannot collect web page data. Whatever would upload in it. 

Important: Noindex means no results in SERP.

<!DOCTYPE html> <html><head> <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> (…) </head> <body>(…)</body> </html>

The code snippet above shows how to add the meta robots tag to your pages.

This webpage code structure adds to the top of the webpage between the beginning and ending head tags.

What is a meta viewport tag, and how to add it to the webpage?

The meta viewport tag is the user’s visible area of a web page and is a vital website element that is added to your web page to ensure that the website design is fully responsive on all devices.

Earlier, websites were designed only for computer screens, so webpages had fixed sizes and looked the same on every device.

Then when the crowd started surfing the internet using mobiles and tablets, the user experience was poor due to the fixed size of web pages. So now, to fix this problem, the browsers on those devices shrink the entire web page to fit the screen.

The screenshot below shows how you can include and configure the meta viewport tag within your code:

<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang=”en”>  <head>  … <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″> …  </head>  …

How To Add The Meta Charset Tag ?

The charset meta tag allows you to define a specific character encoding for your page.

If a website does not use charset tags, a different language may result in garbage text for the browser. In addition, without this tag, a browser is unfamiliar with different types of languages.

<meta charset=”character_set”> Example Specify the character encoding for the HTML document: <head>   <meta charset=”UTF-8″> </head>

Meta Tags Are An Important Part Of SEO

Meta tags are the important ranking factors in the list of responsibilities of a webpage optimization. However, there are more off-page ranking factors you need to consider.

A website can get a high ranking when it correctly explains all the meta tags to the search engines and users.

But the first and most important factor where an SEO expert starts webpage optimization is Meta Title and description tags. A website can get a high ranking when it interprets these two tags correctly for search engines and users.

In the end, Optimize meta tags and other tags to get substantial results. Each tag is important because it can take a page from minor to great.