If you run a website, you must know Meta Tags’ importance. Meta tags are invisible tags that provide information about your page to visitors and search engines. This is to improve your website’s visibility and online presence. Additionally, the tags enable search engines to determine what the website’s content is about more easily.
What Is SEO?
SEO is a continuous process that requires evaluation and optimization of website content, structure, images, and other elements. It also includes off-page activities such as link building and social media optimization.
SEO can improve a website’s ranking and increase its visibility properly. SEO refers to various areas, including on-page optimization, in which web pages are optimized to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic. SEO tags are crucial for on-page optimization.
Search engine crawlers use SEO tags in HTML to determine the content of a web page. Using these tags, search engines determine the relevance of a page to a specific search query. When SEO tags are used correctly, it helps to improve a website’s visibility in search engines and can be remarkably improved, and more targeted traffic can be derived from it.
With the development of sophisticated search engine algorithms, SEO tags have evolved. Keyword stuffing and other black-hat techniques manipulated search engine ranking early on. As search engines became aware of these tactics, they began penalizing websites using them.
What Are Meta Tags?
An HTML tag is a meta tag that provides information about a web page to read its content easily to search engines or other software. The Meta Tags are placed in the web page’s HTML head section under an HTML code, whereas the tags may not be visible to users who open the page.
In the past, meta tags played an important role in SEO because they helped search engines to better understand a page’s content and rank it accordingly. However, several meta tags play a vital role in search engine results pages (SERPs), such as the title tag and meta description tag, and can improve the click-through rate and the level of user engagement.
Optimize these meta tags to ensure they are relevant to the page’s content and contain keywords people will likely search for. This gives the page a better chance of appearing in the SERPs and can lead to more visitors and higher rankings.
You can choose one type of meta tag for each page structure, ensuring that it is easy to navigate, while you can choose another type of meta tag for telling search engines what parts of your page are important and which ones to ignore.
What Role Do Meta Tags Play in SEO?
In SEO, meta tags provide information about a web page’s content to search engines. Meta tags summarize the page’s content and help search engines determine a page’s relevance to a search query.
- They are typically placed in the head section of the HTML code.
- Website visitors can not see meta tags and are not a ranking factor for search engines.
- They help search engines easily identify what a page is about and can help to increase its visibility in search engine results pages.
They are also a great way to control what snippets appear in SERPs, which can help increase a page’s click-through rate. In search engine results pages (SERPs), the title tag is still considered the most important meta tag in terms of SEO.
- The title tag of a website can help increase click-through rates and drive traffic.
- A meta description tag is also critical to SEO since it briefly summarizes a web page’s content in SERPs.
- It can increase user engagement by writing an informative and engaging meta description.
Also, search engine crawlers can be instructed on treating particular web pages through the robots meta tag. This tag can specify how a search engine should index and serve the content and the links that should be followed. Additionally, the robots meta tag can prevent certain URLs from being indexed.
15 Meta Tags That Are Important In SEO
Several SEO tags are commonly used today to make the website’s content easy for visitors and search engines to understand.
Many tags are available to help improve the SEO game, and each of these tags helps to provide relevant information to the search engine, which in turn helps the website rank higher in the search engine results pages.
However, use the tags correctly to improve the chance of the website’s search engine ranking to gather more traffic. Today we are discussing the top 15 meta tags in SEO!
- Meta Description Tags
SERPs display the meta description under the title tag to summarize the page’s content. The meta description tag is an essential part of SEO as it gives users an idea of what to expect when clicking the link.
It can also influence the user to click on the link, as the text can be crafted to draw the user in. However, your meta description tag should be within the limit of 155 – 160 characters (not more than that). So, make sure to make it concise and put keywords to improve the chance of visibility and gain more traffic.
- Title Tags
A web page’s title tag appears as the clickable headline on the search engine results page. It’s important to ensure that the title tag is descriptive and relevant to the content on the page so that users are more likely to click on it.
Title tags should be concise and include the most important keywords for the page. Additionally, the limit of a title tag is 50-60 characters (do not exceed the limit). Make sure to put your keyword in the title tags to get more chances of higher page visibility.
- Header Tags
Search engines understand web pages more easily with header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.). This allows them to easily differentiate between the different sections of a page easily, thus improving their search engine optimization (SEO).
Header tags also make it easier for readers to find the information they seek. It is recommended that the H1 tag contains only one keyword per page. H2 and H3 tags can be used as subheadings to further structure the content.
- Canonical Tags
Using canonical tags, you can indicate which web page version is preferred. This makes it easier for search engines to index the page properly. Canonical tags also help to avoid duplicate content issues, which can negatively affect search engine rankings.
Canonical tags are a simple yet effective way to ensure that the right page version is indexed and ranked in search engines. This helps maximize content visibility and ensure search engine users get the best possible experience.
- Alt Tags
The alt tags on a web page describe the images to search engines. This helps search engines to index the images and display them in image search results. It also helps people with visual impairments who use screen readers to understand the page’s contents. Alt tags should be descriptive and concise.
This is important because search engines use these tags to index the images accurately. However, it will help website visitors know more about the content of the web page and also helps search engines understand things better.
- Robots Meta Tag
Search engine crawlers use the robots meta tag to determine which pages to crawl on a website. The robots meta tag is a simple tag placed in the head HTML of a page, and it can be used to control how search engines access and index content.
It is useful for preventing search engines from crawling pages that are not meant to be indexed. It helps new websites make their crawler process easier and faster than those who don’t activate their robots meta tag.
- Schema Markup
Schema markup is an HTML tag that offers additional details to search engines about the web page’s content. This helps search engines better understand the content of the page, which can result in improved visibility in search engine result pages.
It can also enable rich snippets to be displayed in search engine results, providing users with more information and higher click-through rates.
- Rel=Canonical Tag
Search engines use the rel=canonical tag to determine which page is relevant to be considered the canonical version (original). This tag helps search engines to remove duplicate content and rank the pages correctly. It also helps avoid confusion with the same content being indexed multiple times.
- Noindex Tag
Noindex tags instruct search engines not to index a specific page. This helps to keep certain pages out of search engine results and prevents them from being indexed in the first place.
This can be useful when pages are not intended for public consumption or when the content is not ready to be shared. The tag also helps website pages crawl easily and more effectively to target audiences more specifically.
- Open Graph Tags
Open Graph tags are metadata tags that optimize the appearance of a website on social media. Open Graph tags allow a website’s content to be displayed more prominently when shared on social media platforms, improving engagement.
This metadata also helps social media platforms accurately attribute the content to the source. As a result of these tags, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can view the page more visually appealing and informatively when shared on social media platforms.
- Nofollow Tag
Search engines do not follow links on a specific page when the nofollow tag is used. This tag instructs search engines not to follow or index the link. This is useful when linking to pages that are not relevant or trustworthy. It also helps to prevent link spam and to avoid restricted content being published.
- Author Tags
An author tag indicates who wrote a piece of content. Including an author tag on any created content is important, as it allows readers to find out who wrote the article easily.
It also helps build trust and credibility with the readers, as they know who is responsible for the content. Authorship and authority can be established for the author and the website that publishes the content using these tags.
- Keyword Tag
Most search engines no longer use the keywords meta tag, although it used to be important for SEO. This is because a website’s content is much more important than the meta tags for SEO.
Search engines focus on the page’s content and use algorithms to rank it, so meta tags are not as essential anymore. Search engines use this to understand the content of a page by listing the keywords or phrases it targets.
- Refresh Tag
After a specified period, a refresh tag redirects users to a new web page. This is done to keep web content current and up-to-date. Refresh tags can redirect users to a different page or the same page with updated content.
A page always displays the most recent version to users. Users can use this tag to navigate to new page versions or manage website migrations.
- Viewport Tag
On mobile devices, the viewport tag controls the size and dimensions of the viewport. This allows developers to set the width and initial scale of the viewport to ensure that the web page is displayed correctly on a wide range of devices. The viewport tag also helps to ensure that all the elements on the page are sized correctly, making it easier to navigate the page on a mobile device.
Conclusion
A website’s visibility and search engine ranking can be improved using additional HTML tags. These tags make it easier for search engines to categorize and index the website’s content accurately. This can make the website more visible and easily accessible to potential visitors. Additionally, it can help boost the website’s ranking on search engine results pages. These tags include meta description tags, title tags, header tangas, canonical tags, alt tags, robots meta tags, schema markup, noindex tag, open graph tags, nofollow tags, author tags, keyword tags, refresh tags and viewport tags.