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Written by: Mason Brown
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are snippets of text describing a page’s content . The meta-tags do not appear on the page itself, but just in the page’s code. We all know tags from blog culture, and meta-tags are less or more the same thing, little content descriptors that help inform search engines what any web page is about. A single difference that you may see between tags that you can see and tags that you may not see is location. Meta tags exist just in HTML, most often at the head of the page and so are just visible to search engines. “Meta” refers to “metadata” which is a type of data these tags offer – data about some data on your page.
Do Meta Tags assist in SEO?
Yes, Meta tags do, however not all of them and not all the time. One of the aims of this article is to explain which meta-tags help you get the word out and which have been outdated.
If you seek to find out if a provided page is using meta tags, simply right-click anywhere on the page and select the view page source.
A new tab may open in Chrome. Apart from at the top or at the head of the page is where Meta tags could be.
Identify your Meta Tags
There are four key types of meta-tags that are important to know about and we’ll discuss them all here. Some may be not as useful as they were once. Others are important to be used regularly and may increase your traffic by letting Google know who you are and what do you offer.
Title tag
The title tag is nowhere available on the page but it is available on top of the browser. Since meta tag may not necessarily be similar to the title of the page that you are viewing, but search engines identify the title tag as the title of your web page. Title tag comprises of some important information which is important for SEO optimization of the page, and it is referred to have an exclusive title tag which is relevant to each page of your webpage, for a better search engine ranking. If you really wish to optimize your web with some SEO meta-tags, then it is important to have some accurate and precise title tag demonstrating the exact information offer on the web page.
Meta Description Tag
Meta description tags are not considered very important terms in SEO but the meta-description tags are blue URLs that appear under search engine results page, and also determine if on the basis of such description tags can be defined as HTML tags summarizing the webpage accurately and briefly.
Though a meta description tag may not be that important as a meta tag for SEO, however, it is important for making a webpage clickable and needs to be unique, precise and at the same time should make it easier for the users to find information that they are actually looking for. For instance, if someone is looking for “What are SEO meta tags”? A page with meta description tag of SEO meta tags or what are SEO meta tags is more likely to be opened then a page having a title tag in the description instead of word description tag. Meta description tag needs to be unique, precise and often between 140-160 characters.
Meta Keywords Tag
In the year 2017, in terms of meta tags for SEO, keyword incorporation into the meta tags is considered unimportant. However, for some professionals, it is still possible to optimize the meta-description or a keyword so that the search engine can identify the hidden metatag. But the meta keyword tag usually needs to be a short full phrase, and it is not suggested to keep the meta keyword tag just the same as the title tag. It is a known fact that meta keywords are not important in SEO anymore, but no one ever knew what part these are still playing in the Google ranking algorithm. With that, there is no harm in adding meta keywords tag for SEO so as to communicate a message that your searchers are actually looking for.
Social Meta Tags
Social meta-tags are also known as the open graph tags and are the tags that are used to control the content a social media page usually generate. Social media tags are one of the perfect ways for you to control how your content display on social media pages instead of social media platform giving a title and description to your content itself. Social media tags are not that much relevant to SEO meta-tags for WebPages, till the time you are promoting your website pages through social media pages. Then you need to use tags that would describe your webpage in a better way.
Robots and Particular Bots
There is not necessarily a robot meta-tag for SEO as robot meta-tags are bots and are just an indication to the search engine bots on what they need to do with the page. A robot needs to be understood when it comes to link following and indexing, and you just need to add a robot meta tag for SEO if you seek the command of link follow or command of the index to be converted into something else. A general HTML tag for removing index is mentioned below:
How to use SEO Meta Tags?
There is no right or any wrong way for using meta-tags for SEO, but some usual guidelines for every type of meta-tags are to keep them all precise, descriptive and accurate. The meta-tags are hidden in HTML and also appear on the browser or some clickable links. If in case the meta-tags that you are entering for SEO is a perfect combination of the random keywords that you are using, then the search engine may not really identify the meta-tags that you are adding. Hence always keep the meta-tags for SEO short as well as concise preferably between 140-160 characters and make them precise as per contents of the webpage.
Different from the content of your page, your meta-tags may be based on some real-searches. However, this doesn’t mean that your content is not based on real searches., you can spell it how it is usually misspelled during real searches and it will not affect the quality of your content. However, just now because of the abuse of meta-keywords in tags and descriptions to improve search engine ranking, Google has lessened the dependency of ranking on meta-keywords and has altered the search engine algorithm, but despite this change, there is hardly any way of knowing how much meta-tags for SEO still matter.
Conclusion
In today’s competitive work of SEO ranking, every little bit plays an important role and SEO meta-tags need to be given equal importance mainly for rating web pages. Therefore, it is important that you remember that meta-tags should be reflected accurately when you are choosing meta-keywords for your page on the basis of your page content.