SEO meta tags are a critical part of on-page optimization and can help your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, it’s important to use them wisely – stuffing your tags with too many keywords will likely do more harm than good. When implemented appropriately, SEO meta tags can generate additional traffic to your site and lift your site’s search engine ranking.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are written descriptions of a web page’s content. Search engines use tags to help determine how to categorize a website.
Types of Meta tags
SEO Meta tags guide on a website provide information about the content on the website to search engines and website visitors. Meta tags are not visible on the website itself, but they can be seen in the source code of the page.
There are 8 distinct types of meta tags known as title, description, keywords, and robots. Each type of meta tag serves a different purpose.
- Title Tags
- Meta Description
- Robots meta tag
- Meta viewport
- Meta Charset
- Alt text
- Canonical tag
- Header tag (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
Title Tags
It’s important to make the page title unique on every page of your website and to match the content on the page. The title tag is placed in the HTML coding for the page. The title tag is typically shown as the clickable headline for a given result, and it may also be used as the default text for social media sharing.
Why Title Tags are important for SEO
Title tags are one of the most important on-page SEO elements. They are used to tell search engines what your web page is about. It is found in the head section of the webpage code, and it is typically displayed in the top left corner of the browser window.
Best Practices for Title Tags
Here are some best practices for title tags:
- Use keywords wisely: Keywords are an important part of title tags, but you don’t want to stuff them in there. Choose one or two keywords that accurately describe your page and use them sparingly.
- Keep it short and sweet: Title tags should be 50-60 characters long, including spaces. Search engines will truncate anything longer than that, so make sure all the important information is in front.
How to add a title tag to your page
Adding a title tag to your page is easy. Just add the following code to the <head> section of your HTML:
<title>Your Title Here</title>Replace “Your Title Here” with the actual title of your page. Make sure to keep your title under 60 characters, as anything longer will be cut off by Google.
Meta Description
A meta description is a brief summary of a page that is used by search engines. Meta descriptions are also used by social media platforms to generate preview snippets when a page is shared.
Why It’s important for SEO
Now, we’ll learn about the importance of Meta Description. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) keyed in on the meta descriptions can improve their click-through rates and see where the websites may be related.
Best Practices for Meta Description
The best meta descriptions are between 150 and 160 characters long. They should be concise and descriptive and should include the main keywords for your website. Meta descriptions should also be unique to each page on your website.
How to add a description tag to your page
Adding a description tag to your page is easy and only requires a few minutes of your time. Here’s how to do it:
1. Find the section of your page where you want to add the description tag. This is typically the <head> section, but it can also be the <body> section.
2. Add the following code to that section:
<meta name="description" content="Your description here">3. Replace “Your description here” with a brief, accurate description of the page’s content. Keep it under 160 characters so that it doesn’t get cut off in search results.
4. Save your changes and upload the revised page to your server.
That’s all there is to it!
Robots Meta Tag
The meta robot tag is one of the most important tags for SEO. It tells search engines how to handle a webpage and whether they should contain it or not. The meta robot tags have four different values:
index – This value tells search engines that they can index the page.
follow – This value tells search engines that they can follow the links on the page.
nofollow – This value tells search engines not to follow the links on the page.
noindex – This value tells search engines not to index the page.
Why It’s important for SEO
Meta Robots tags are important for SEO because they are used by search engines to control how they crawl and index your site. You can use the meta tags to tell a search engine that you do not want it to index a certain page on your website, or you can use the tags to tell a search engine not to follow any links in a certain page.
Best Practices for Robots Meta Tag
When it comes to robots meta tags, there are two directives you must be aware of: “index” and noindex. “Index” means builders can index the page, while “noindex” implies that they should not index the page.
How to add a robots meta tag to your page
To add a robot meta tag to your page, you need to edit the HTML code of your page. You can do this in a text editor like Notepad++ or Dreamweaver. In the head section of your HTML code, look for the tag with the name “robots.” If there isn’t already a “robots” meta tag, you can add one.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>Meta Viewport
The viewport is the area of the page that’s visible to the user. The viewport meta tag tells the browser how to adjust the page’s dimension and scaling. It varies with the device and will be smaller on a mobile phone than on a computer screen.
Why Meta Viewport is important for SEO
The meta viewport tag tells browsers how to render a page on different devices. Without this tag, your pages may not display correctly on mobile devices, which can hurt your ranking in mobile search results.
Best Practices for Meta Viewport
There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to optimizing your meta viewport:
- Make sure the width is set to the device width. This will ensure that your page renders correctly on all devices.
- Set the initial scale to 1.0. This will ensure that users are able to zoom in and out of your page without issue.
- Don’t forget to include the viewport meta tag in the head of your HTML document.
- Make sure you test your website on all devices before you launch it!
How to add a meta viewport tag to your page
To add a viewport meta tag to your page, simply add the following code to the <head> section of your HTML:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">Meta Charset
One of the most important aspects of on-page SEO is setting the correct meta charset for your web pages. Meta charset tells the browser how to interpret the text on your page, and can be either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1.
Why It’s important for SEO
Meta Charset tags to provide information about the character encoding of a document. They are used by browsers to determine how to display the document correctly. If a browser does not know how to interpret the character encoding, it may display the text incorrectly.
Best Practices for Meta Charset
The charset meta tag should be placed in the head section of your HTML code:
If you are using a software package or CMS to generate your HTML, make sure that it is configured to output the charset meta tag correctly.
How to add a meta charset tag to your page
To add a meta charset tag to your page, you’ll need to edit the HTML code. Look for the <head> section of your code and add the following line:
<meta charset="UTF-8">The UTF-8 setting is the most common, but you can also use other character sets like ISO-8859-1. Once you’ve added the meta charset tag, save your HTML file and upload it to your web server. That’s all there is to it!
Alt text
When it comes to SEO, most people focus on the big things like keyword density and backlinks. But there’s one small thing that can make a big difference: alt text. Alt text is the text that appears in place of an image if the image can’t be displayed for some reason.
Why it’s important for SEO
Alt text is short for “alternative text,” and it’s used to describe the contents of an image on a web page. Search engines can’t read images, so they rely on alt text to understand what an image is about. That’s why alt text is important for SEO.
Best practices for Alt text
When adding alt text to an image, be sure to keep the following best practices in mind:
- Keep it short and sweet. Alt text should be no more than a few words long.
- Be descriptive. The goal of alt text is to describe the image, so make sure your description is accurate and informative.
- Use keywords wisely. When possible, include keywords that are relevant to your website’s content or target audience.
How to add an alt tag to your page
To add an alt tag, simply add the following code to your page:
<img src="/images/some-image.png" alt="this is the alt text">Canonical Tag
The canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page to index. For example, if you have a page with two URLs – http://example.com/page and http://example.com/page?id=1 – the canonical tag can be used to tell search engines that they should index the first URL and ignore the second URL.
Why it’s important for SEO
The canonical tag is one of the most essential. Here’s why:
The canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page to index. For example, let’s say you have two versions of the same page: one at www.example.com and one at example.com. Without a canonical tag, search engines would index both pages separately.
Best Practices for Canonical Tag
Here are some best practices for using canonical tags:
- Use the canonical tag on all versions of your website’s pages, including the www and non-www versions.
- Point the canonical tag to the URL you want search engines to index.
- Make sure your website’s server is configured to redirect traffic from the non-canonical URL to the canonical URL.
How to add a canonical tag to your page
How to add a canonical tag to your page, simply add the following tag to the <head> section of your code:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page-1">Replace “https://example.com/page-1” with the URL of the original page. That’s it! You’ve now added a canonical tag to your page.
Header tag (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
In addition to the h1 tag, there are also h2, h3, and h4 tags. These are all used to help structure your content and make it easier for people to read. The h2 and h3 tags can be used to break up your content into sections, and the h4 tag can be used to further divide those sections.
Why Header tag is important for SEO
Header tags are important for SEO because they help search engines understand the structure of your website and find the content that is most relevant to the user’s query. Header tags also give users a preview of what they will find on your website, which can help them decide whether to click through to your site or not.
Best Practices for Header tag
When it comes to coding a website, header tags are some of the most important. These HTML tags are used to indicate headings and subheadings on a page, and they help both users and search engine crawlers understand the structure of your content.
How to add a header tag to your page
The HTML for the heading above might appear something like this if we looked it up:
<h2>What is a Header Tag?</h2>SEO Meta tags Checklist
If you’re new to SEO, or just want to make sure you’re doing everything you can to optimize your website, then this SEO meta tags checklist is for you.
Meta tags are one of the most important elements of SEO, so it’s important to get them right. Here’s a quick and easy checklist to make sure your meta tags are optimized for SEO:
1. Make sure your title tag is no more than 60 characters long, including spaces.
2. Include keywords in your title tag, but don’t stuff them in there.
3. Write a unique and descriptive meta description for each page on your website.
4. Include keywords in your meta description, but again, don’t stuff them in there.
5. Use alt text for all images on your website.
FAQs
Do meta tags help SEO?
Yes, Meta tags guide for beginners really help SEO. For example, if the web page has a meta tag for “keywords” containing relevant keywords for the topic, then the search engine may be more likely to rank that page higher than a similar page without them.
What are the 3 meta attributes?
Meta tags have three basic attributes: name, content, and http-equiv. The type of information is specified by the name attribute. The meta-information is included in the content tag, while the http-euiv attribute defines a specific header type.
Does Google use meta tags?
Yes, This information is used by search engines to index the page and show it in search results.
How do I find meta tags?
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; they don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s code. Search engines may use them to determine what a webpage is about, and also social media sites can make previews for links.
Is meta keywords important for SEO?
Yes,If you have a website with a lot of content, then using meta keywords can help search engines find your site more easily.
