Until recently, the page description, i.e. the popular meta Description tag, played a significant role when it comes to website positioning. It had a significant impact on search results, which is why it was saturated to the limit of key phrases relevant to a given subpage. What is meta data SEO?
What are meta tags?
Meta tags provide page information in the HTML of the document. This information is called “metadata” and although it is not displayed on the page itself, it can be read by search engines and crawlers.
Search engines like Google use metadata from meta tags to understand additional information about a website. They can use this information for ranking purposes, to display fragments in search results, and sometimes they can ignore meta tags.
Do meta tags help SEO?
Yes, but not everyone and not all the time. One of the goals of this page is to clarify which meta tags can potentially help in your SEO rankings, and which most have ceased to be used.
If you want to find out if a page uses meta tags, right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source”.
The new tab will open in Chrome (this will be a popup window in Firefox). The top portion or “header” of the page is where the meta tags are located.
How to add a title tag to your page
Paste the following code into the <head> section of your page:
<title> This is the title of the page. </ Title>
If you use WordPress, install an SEO plugin such as Yoast. You should see the location of the title tag on the page or post editor.
Other CMS, such as Squarespace and Wix, have similar functionality built in.
Know your meta tags
There are four main types of meta tags to know about and we’ll discuss them all here. Some are not as useful as they used to be. Others are worth regular use and are likely to increase traffic by telling Google who you are and what you offer. (There are more than four types of meta tags, but some of them are less popular or not related to internet marketing.)
The four types that we will discuss here are:
- Keyword attribute – a series of keywords that you think are relevant to the page.
- Title tag – this is the text shown at the top of the browser. Search engines see this text as the “title” of the page.
- Meta description attribute – Short description of the page.
- Meta Robots attribute – Indicates to search engine robots (bots or “bots”) what to do with the page.
How to optimize meta tags: checklist
Meta tags can help both search engines and search engines. They will help you improve the user experience and display information about your company.
This can help improve authority, increase search presence, and thus higher rankings.
If you want to test your performance using meta tags, here’s a quick checklist to get you started:
- Check that all pages and content have title tags and meta descriptions
- Start paying more attention to the headlines and structure of your content
- Don’t forget to tag your photos with alternative text
- Use robot meta tags to show search engines how they should access your content
- Search for duplicate pages and use canonical tags to avoid cannibalizing your own content with duplicate or similar content
- Create a checklist of steps that you need to repeat when creating new content, and turn the meta tags into part of your routine.
