Meta Tags in Your Content: A Beginner’s Guide
Meta tags may sound like jargon to you, but trust us, they’re the secret ingredient to optimizing your website for search engines. These tiny snippets of HTML code help Google understand what your website is all about and can influence how it appears in search results. Not only that, but they also make sure your website displays correctly on all devices, which means you'll rank higher in Google's search results.
In this guide, we’ll show you the basics and best practices of using meta tags to help search engines recognize your web pages and increase their ranking.
What are meta tags?
Meta tags are snippets of HTML code that provide search engines and other automated web services with information about a particular page on your website. They can have an impact on how users interact with the content, as well as how it appears in search engine rankings.
Types of meta tags
Title Tags: Title tags provide the title of your webpage, which is used to display in search engine results. It’s important to include keywords that accurately describe the content on your page in the title tag. This helps search engines understand the relevancy of your content and rank it higher in their results.
Description Tags: Description tags provide a description of your webpage, which is used to display in search engine results. This is an opportunity to give potential visitors an idea of what’s on the page and entice them to click through. As with the title tag, it’s important to include relevant keywords in your description, as this will improve your content’s visibility and ranking.
Robot Meta Tags: Robot meta tags provide instructions to search engines on how they should index and crawl your website. You can use these tags to tell search engines not to index a particular page or tell them to only index certain pages.
Viewport Meta Tags: Viewport meta tags provide information to search engines about the size and orientation of your website. This helps them display your content correctly on any device, ensuring that users have a great experience when they visit your site.
Using meta tags correctly can help you get more traffic to your website by increasing its presence in search engine results. They also make sure that your pages display correctly on all devices, which means they’ll be more likely to show up in search engine results.
How to optimize your title tag for SEO
The title tag is one of the most important meta tags, as it’s visible to both search engines and people browsing the web. In fact, it’s often the first thing a searcher sees when browsing through results.
Your title tag can make or break a searcher's decision to click on your page. So, make sure you follow these recommendations when crafting creative and descriptive page titles:
Include a unique title tag for each webpage
Keep your headlines under 60 characters
Avoid generic and vague titles like "Home" for your homepage
Use sentence case or title case
Match the search intent of your target audience
Avoid using clickbait titles
Include a relevant keyword where appropriate
Create a distinctive title tag for every page on your website.
How to optimize your meta description for SEO
While meta descriptions may not directly impact your website's ranking on Google, they are crucial for enticing searchers to click on your website. When crafting your meta descriptions, you should aim to be creative, descriptive, and concise, and include target keywords where they make sense.
To create effective meta descriptions, follow these best practices:
Keep them under 160 characters
Write distinct summaries for each page on your website
Avoid using duplicate meta descriptions
Use proper sentence case
Ensure accuracy and relevance to the content on the page
Match search intent to the searcher's query
Avoid using clickbait titles
Only include your target keyword if it makes sense in context
You can use an On-Page SEO Checker to help you optimize your meta tags and ensure that your website's titles match what's displayed in search results.
How to optimize your robot meta tags for SEO
Robots meta tags are like traffic signs that direct search engines on how to crawl and index your website. Without them, search bots and web crawlers will index every page and link you create. Luckily, the robots meta tag can give you more control over how Googlebot handles the indexing of your website.
When optimizing your robot meta tags, remember to:
Only include necessary directives in the robots tag
Use keyword targeting when using the noindex directive
Avoid using too many nofollow links in the robots tag
Include the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header if you use a CMS like WordPress
Make sure there are no conflicting directives in your robots tag
Use the canonical link element if you have duplicate content on your website
Ensure crawlability when using the nofollow directive
By optimizing your robots meta tags, you can control how Google crawls and indexes your website. For instance, using the noindex parameter can prevent Google from indexing duplicate content, which can negatively impact your SEO. The nofollow meta robots tag, on the other hand, can prevent Google from crawling links on specific pages, such as a comments section that may attract spammy backlinks.
How to optimize your viewport meta tag for SEO
Let’s start with a simple definition: the viewport is the visible area of a webpage that the user can see. If a visitor views your website on a mobile device, the viewport will be much smaller than if they view it on a desktop computer.
To make your webpage mobile-friendly, simply add the following code to the <head> section of your HTML:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
The viewport meta tag tells the browser, like Chrome or Firefox, to display your webpage on different screen sizes, such as desktop, tablet, or mobile. It's an important part of responsive design, which automatically adjusts the size and shape of HTML elements to fit the user’s device and browser.
Using responsive design makes it easy to display the right page to the user, providing a better user experience. It's Google’s recommended method for displaying content to mobile users because more than 50% of internet searches are made on mobile devices. So, the viewport meta tag has become one of the best SEO practices.
Don't sweat about meta tags with us
The meta tags above are just some of the most important ones to include on your website. Other tags that should be considered include Open Graph tags, which help social media sites like Facebook and Twitter display your content accurately, and Twitter Cards, which allow you to attach media like images and videos to your tweets.
By optimizing these meta tags for SEO, you can improve the visibility of your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). This will help drive more traffic to your website and increase conversions. As a result, your business will benefit from a larger customer base and increased profits.
When you choose TalktheTalk to write your SEO content, the meta tags are just one of many aspects of SEO that we take into consideration. Save time, money, and effort with our up-to-date best practices for optimizing meta tags and ensure that your content is optimized for search engine visibility.
