While building a web page, the first thing you set up are meta tags. Without the use of meta tags, it would be hard to get organic traffic. This is why meta tags are the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. This blog focuses on what meta tags are and how to use meta tags in SEO. It also talks about meta tags’ importance and techniques that will help you get the best out of meta tags.
For setting up meta tags, it is significant to know about meta tags’ importance and techniques. What are meta tags? These are the tags that describe a web page’s content to a search engine. Meta tags appear between the <head> and </head> tags. Once, they used to be a ranking factor, but were dropped when people started misusing them. Meta tags are still important for SEO. This is because meta tags impact the crawler’s understanding of your webpage and significantly affect your rankings. In order to know meta tags’ importance and techniques, keep reading.
Importance of meta tags
- Increase rankings: Meta tags are important when a search engine crawler takes time to understand what a web page is all about. A keyword focused meta tag would then determine both the visibility and rankings of a webpage. Moreover, meta tags help to rank for close variants of keywords you use.
- Increase relevancy: Meta tags can be read by search engines and they tell the crawlers what the webpage is about. Thus, they increase the relevance of website for the visitors. Even if the keywords used in the search query are different, crawlers can determine whether the webpage is relevant to the query using meta tags.
- Better SEO: Overall, meta tags are the first step of search engine optimization. By knowing how to use meta tags in SEO can contribute to better optimization of a website. A good meta tag, especially a good meta description, can increase CTR of your website.
Techniques of using meta tags
- One unique meta tag per page: It is important to have unique meta tags per webpage. Otherwise, your web pages will look similar in the SERPs even if they are for different topics. You can choose to not include meta tags for every webpage and just include them in your most visited ones. This is much better than having duplicate meta tags. Having a number of webpages with the same meta tags will confuse the visitors and they might choose to click on other results.
- Keep meta tags short: It is a good practice to keep your meta tags short, preferably within 150 to 160 characters. This is advisable especially for meta description tags. Meta descriptions that are too long are cut off in the middle by the search engines. As for meta title tags, make sure to keep them within 60-65 characters.
- Create value: Meta tags should be created by keeping in mind that they should provide value to visitors. Until you include what your webpage offers as well as a catchy reason for visitors to click on your webpage, they will click on other results. Your aim should be to create meta tags that provide a value proposition which makes the viewers curious to check the content of your website.
- Use meta keywords: Meta tags should have at least one or two keywords that are relevant to the content of your web page. This will make it easier for crawlers to crawl and index your website accordingly. Avoid having too many keywords or keyword stuffing as it will lead to a drop in the SERP rankings. Check out our blog on CHOOSING THE RIGHT KEYWORDS IN CONTENT WRITING- AN INTEGRAL PART OF SEO STRATEGY to get a better know-how of using appropriate keywords.
- Keep checks on web listings: Keep an eye on web listings and research what meta tags are being used by competitors. Make sure to change or modify your meta tags according to keyword popularity.
Even if meta tags are not one of the ranking factors for search engines, they are still important. This is because crawlers use them to know the relevancy of your web page to a search query. Optimizing meta tags is still important for search engine optimization. Hopefully, this blog on meta tags’ importance and techniques will help you to optimize your web pages better and get more website traffic. You can check our blog on SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY TITLE TAGS: IMPORTANCE AND TIPS TO CREATE THEM to get more insights on title tags.
