What is a Meta Tag? The 10 most important meta tags and the optimal way for SEO

In SEO, sometimes we tend to focus on one aspect and optimize efforts over the other.

Special link building is often referred to as "the most important thing to optimize".

In fact, as Google's John Mueller said, there's nothing that matters most - no tips for pulling high rankings. Instead, we need to focus on a holistic SEO St-Sauveur strategy.

What is a Meta Tag?

Meta tags are tags used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a web page. They are part of a website'stag, and it can be read by search engines and web crawlers.

Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page to help engines find out what the site is about and whether to be crawled and indexed. Search engines like Google use metadata from meta tags to understand more information about a website.

They may use this information for ranking purposes, to display snippets in search results, and sometimes they may omit meta tags.

With that in mind, let's take a look at which meta tags are important to SEO and how to use them well.

The title tag is your primary and most important anchor.

The element usually appears as a clickable title in the SERPs and is also visible on social media and in browsers. The title tag is placed within theof your website and is intended to provide a clear and comprehensive idea of what the page is about. But do they have a big impact on rankings as they have been for many years?

Over the past few years, user behavioral factors have been discussed a lot as a logical proof of relevance and therefore a ranking signal - even Google reps acknowledged the impact. its action here and there. The page title remains the first thing a searcher sees in the SERPs and decides if the page is likely to answer a search intent.

A well-written article can drive clicks and traffic, with the least impact on rankings. A simple test can also show that Google no longer needs your title tag to include an exact match keyword in order to know what topic the page covers. What search engines are looking at is the panorama and they tend to evaluate the entire content of a page, but the cover of a book is still important - especially when it comes to interacting with a searcher. sword.

Best practice

• Give each page a unique title that concisely and accurately describes the content of the page.
• Keep titles up to 50-60 characters long (so they don't get truncated in the SERPs).
• Remember that long headlines are shortened to about 600-700px in the SERP.
• Put important keywords first, but in a natural way, as if you were writing the headline for the visitor in the first place.
• Use your brand name in the title, even if it is not displayed on the SERPs, it will still make a difference for search engines.

Tip: Use your Title tag to draw attention

The title tag is precious not only because it stands out in the main SERP but also because it acts as a tab title in your web browser. This can be used to grab the user's attention. For example: It's the exact approach used by Facebook / LinkedIn to show you you are informed and can be used to give the effect quite well.

2. Meta Description: The meta description tag

The meta description is also in the web page and is usually displayed (though certainly not always) in the SERP snippet along with the title and page URL.

For example, here is the meta description for this article:

 

And yes, the meta description itself is not a ranking factor. But for anyone trying to increase their clicks and polish their brand SERPs, that's a unique opportunity.

• Description makes up the largest portion of the SERP snippet and invites searchers to click on your website by promising a clear and comprehensive solution to their query.
• Description impacts the number of clicks you get, and can also improve CTR and lower bounce rate if the page's content actually meets the promises. That is why the description should be as realistic as it is compelling and clearly reflect the content.
• If your description contains keywords that searchers used in their search query, they will appear on the SERP in bold. This helps you stand out and informs searchers exactly what they will find on your page.

There's no way to include every keyword you want to rank for in your meta description, and there's really no need to - instead, write a few sentences that bind the description about the gist of your page, with a number of keywords included.

A good way to find out what to write in your meta description, what best matches your specific topic right now, is to do some competition research. Look up how your top ranked competitors fill in their own descriptions to get a feel for the best use cases in every given scenario.

Best pratice

• Give each page a unique meta description that clearly reflects that page's worth.
• Google snippets typically have a maximum of 160-300 characters (including spaces).
• Include your most important keywords so they can be highlighted on the actual SERPs, but be careful to avoid keyword stuffing, don't make your description just a combination of keywords you're currently on. target.
• Optionally, use a compelling call to action, a unique suggestion you give, or additional hints on what to expect - 'Learn', 'Buy' works, etc.

Tips Meta

The meta description doesn't have to be just a sentence or two. As Google announced, you should also add some information about the page search engines will crawl for a more colorful SERP. For example: For an article with an author, you can add the publication date, author name, etc. For the product page, you can enter an item's price and shelf life.

3. The meta keyword tag

Some articles say that fill in the keyword meta tag with a list of target keywords. This is pointless and potentially bad advice. Google has not used meta keywords to rank for since 2009 because: […] The keyword meta tag is quickly becoming an area where someone can stuff normally unrelated keywords without the typical visitor ever seeing those keywords. Because meta keyword tags are often overused, many years ago Google started ignoring the keyword meta tag. Bing went a step further in 2011 when they claimed to use the tag as a spam signal. So if you're keyword-filled, then it might work against you in Bing. For this reason, it's best to stay on the safe side and remove the keyword meta tags from your website.

4. The Content-Type Meta Tag

This tag is necessary to declare your charset for the page and must be present on every page.

Ignoring this can affect the way your page appears in the browser. Some of the options are listed below, taking note of how to choose the right charset for your website.

 

 

5. Meta Refresh Redirect Tab

The meta refresh tag tells the web browser to redirect the user to a different URL after a certain amount of time.

However, some browsers do not support this tag, and users may find it confusing. The W3C does not recommend using this card. Instead, you should use a 301 server-side redirect command.

Why is it so important to SEO

The meta refresh redirect tags are important for SEO in the sense that you shouldn't use them, even though Google understands and respects them. There are several reasons for this: • Not supported by all browsers; • May cause user confusion (and cause security concerns); • The pages need to parse before they see the destination URL, which can take some time.

Best practice

• Avoid meta refresh redirect tags unless absolutely necessary; • Use Redirect 301 instead.

How to add a meta refresh redirect tag to your page (if you really need one)

Paste the code below into thesection of your page:The content attribute specifies a delay in seconds. The attribute URLs define the URL redirection.

6. The meta robots tag

The page-level robots meta tag with the content = “noindex” attribute instructs search engines not to index any given page.

The nofollow attribute instructs not to follow any links on that page.

 

While these tags are not directly correlated with rankings, in some cases they can have some impact on how your website looks in the eyes of search engines in general. For example, Google dislikes Thin Content.

You may not have created it intentionally, but do happen to have some pages that have little user value, but are necessary to be on the site for a number of reasons.

You can also have "draft" pages or placeholder pages that you need to publish when they're unfinished or best optimized. You probably wouldn't want such pages to be considered while evaluating the overall quality of your site.

In other cases, you may want certain pages not to be out of the SERPs as they have some special transaction types that are supposed to be accessible only with a direct link (e.g. from a newsletter ).

Finally, if you have a site-wide search option, Google recommends that you close your custom results pages, which can be crawled indefinitely and waste bot resources without content. use only. In the above cases, noindex and nofollow tags help a lot, as they give you some control over your website as it is seen by search engines.

Best practice

• Closing unnecessary/unfinished pages with thin content have little value and are not intended to appear in the SERPs.
• Close pages that are unreasonably wasteful of crawl budget.
• Make sure you do not confuse important indexing pages.

7. Rel = "canonical" link tag

The rel = "canonical" link tag is a way to tell search engines which version of the page you consider the main page and want to be indexed by search engines and found by people.

It is often used in cases when the same page is available under many different URLs or many different pages have very similar content covering the same topic. Internally duplicate content is not considered strictly reproduced content as there is usually no intent to be manipulated behind it.

However, this can become a source of confusion for search engines: unless you indicate which URL is the one you want to rank for, the search engines can choose it for you. The selected URL is crawled more often, while others are being left out.

You can see that while there is almost no risk of a penalty, such a situation is not optimal. Another benefit is that a page's normalization makes it easy to track content-related performance statistics.

Mueller also mentioned that using rel = canonical for duplicate content will help Google consolidate all your efforts and pass link signals from all versions of the page to the preferred version.

That's where using canonical tags can help you steer your SEO efforts in one direction.

SEO best practices

• Pages with similar content on the same topic.
• Duplicate pages are available under multiple URLs.
• Versions of the same page with session IDs or other URL Parameters do not affect content.
• Use canonical tags for almost identical pages carefully: if the two pages linked by canonical tags differ too much in content, search engines will simply ignore the tag.

8. Schema markup: Schema markup

Schema markup is a specific technique for organizing data on each of your websites in a way recognized by search engines. It's a great feature to roll out because it's a win-win.

Structured schema markup:

• Is a great boost to your UX.
• Bring great SEO value.

The "Semantic Web" is a "meaningful web" where the focus shifts from keyword cases and backlinks to the concepts behind them and the relationship between them. Correct structured data markup is something that helps search engines not only read the content but also understand certain words related to it.

The SERPs have evolved so much that you may not even need to click through the results to get an answer to your query.

But if one is about to click, a detailed snippet - with beautiful images, 5-star rating, specific price range, availability, hours of operation, or anything else useful - is most likely to catch the eye and attract more clicks than a plain text result.

Assigning the schema tags to certain page elements makes your SERP snippet informative, useful, and appealing to users. And, back to square one, user behavioral factors like CTR and bounce rate will add to the way search engines decide to rank your site.

SEO best practices

• Study the schemas available on schema.org.
• Map your most important pages and decide on concepts related to each.
• Implement carefully markup (use Structured Data Markup Helper if needed).
• Thoroughly check the markup with the Rich Results Testing Tool to make sure it's not misleading or incorrectly added.

9. Social media meta tag

The Open Graph was originally introduced by Facebook to allow you to control the look of a page when shared on social networks.

It is also currently recognized by LinkedIn. Twitter tags offer similar improvements but are Twitter-specific.

Here are the main Open Graph tags:

• Og: title - here you set the title you want to display when your page is linked to.
• og: url - the URL of your page.
• og: description - describe your page. Remember that Facebook will only display about 300 description characters.
• og: image - here you can set the URL of the image you want to display when your page is linked to.

Use specific social media meta tags to enhance the look of your links towards your posts. It's not a big tweak and it doesn't affect your rankings on search engines. However, by configuring what the links to your pages look like, you can significantly increase your CTR and UX metrics.

SEO best practices

• Add basic and relevant metadata using the Open Graph protocol, and check the URLs to see how they will be displayed.
• Set up Twitter cards and validate them once done.

10. The Viewport Meta Tag

The Viewport meta tag allows you to configure how a page will be scaled and displayed on any device.

Typically, the tag and value will look like this:

 

Where "width = device-width" will make the page match the width of the screen in pixels regardless of the device and "initial-scale = 1" will establish a 1: 1 relationship between CSS pixels and pixels. regardless of the device, taking into account screen orientation.

Screenshot from Google is enough to show the difference it makes: Viewport meta tags are not directly related to rankings but to user experience. It is especially important to consider the variety of devices in use today and the remarkable transition to mobile web browsing.

As with many of the tags and edits we discussed in this article, being mindful of the viewport meta tag will be something your users will appreciate. If you ignore this, your CTR and bounce rate may suffer.

Conclusion

To get the most out of your Onpage technique, don't ignore the small tweaks that contribute to the big picture.

Some meta tags are still required, as they make up your page's classification.

Other tags may not be important, but they can give you a decent snippet of code ahead of mindless competitors. Small changes that improve user experience and help search engines better understand your site will be appreciated by both sides and are sure to benefit in the long run.