Meta Tags

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.