If you want your website to rank high on search engines, you need to make sure you have proper meta tags. Meta tags are snippets of text not seen by your visitors that describe a page’s content. Search engines use these tags to help index and categorize your site.
Why you should care about meta tags
Search engines use meta tags to determine if your page is relevant to a user’s search query.
Meta tags 101
Meta tags are an important aspect of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). They help search engines understand what your page is about and determine whether it is relevant to a user’s search query.
To optimize your website for SEO, you need to make sure that your meta tags are accurate and descriptive. If you’re not sure how to do this, you can always hire an SEO company to help you out.
The different meta tags
While there are many types of meta tags, we’ll cover 4 that are useful for every website. Audits often inchude recomendations for these tags. They include: the title tag, the meta description tag, the keyword tag, and the robots tag.
The Title Tag
The title tag is the most important of all the meta tags. It tells search engines what your website is about. The title should be concise and brief (50-60 characters). It should include your target keyword. Search engines usually use this for the clickable link on search results.
The Meta Description Tag
The meta description tag is also important. This tag describes your page in more detail. The meta description should be around 155 characters long. It should also contain your keywords.
While the meta description tag shouldn’t impact rankings, it is often used as the text snippet that appears in search results. This means that it can influence whether someone clicks through to your page.
The Keyword Tag
The keyword tag tells search engines which keywords are relevant to your website. You should include a few dozen keywords here so that search engines can better match your page to people searching for those terms.
Determining the keywords to use can be difficult. You must do some keyword research to discover what terms people search for to find you.
The Robots Meta Tag
The robots meta tag has a direct impact on how search engines crawl your website. The robots tag tells search engines whether to index a page, or to follow the links on the page.
This is especially important if you have pages that are only accessible after filling out a form, or duplicate pages.
How to use meta tags on your website
You find meta tags in the HTML code of your website and they can be either “name” or “http-equiv” tags. Name tags specify the title, description, and keywords for your website. Http-equiv tags control how browsers cache and display your web pages. To add meta tags to your website, you’ll need to edit the HTML code of your pages. Most content management systems and page builders make this as easy as filling in blanks. There are also plugins for many platforms that will help manage the tags. Otherwise, you may need to edit the html code by hand.
Time to start using meta tags
It’s important to use meta tags to improve your website ranking. Meta tags provide information about your website to search engines. This can help you reach more potential customers and make more sales.
