Meta Tags Optimization is necessary to show give your visitor an overview on the content of your post. In today’s article we will learn:
- Introduction to Meta Tags Optimization
- Why Meta Tags are important
- What are Meta Tags
- Concluding Remarks
An Easy Guide to Meta Tags Optimization
In the previous article, we have read about Keyword research and we have now a fair amount of idea about how to do keyword research for your website.
After we have the relevant keywords, then we frame Meta tags. Now what are Meta tags, if we read the formal definition of meta it means data inside data. Forget this formal definition let’s jump into its practical use and let’s form our own definition.
In this article we will cover the following important topics:
Why Meta Tags are important?
Let’s point down below the importance of meta tags for our website:
- It gives the search engine a summary of your web page content
- The user can also judge your website content by reading the meta description
- An effective meta description with a call to action can give you more benefit
- You can also bold the keyword in the meta description which can get user attention when he may scroll down to the results
As you have read the above points related to Meta tags importance for your website not let’s finally figure out what is Meta tags, types, benefits and how to apply it on your website.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta Tags are snippets of text you describe your website content. Meta Tags includes various types like Title Tag, Meta Description, Alt text, Header Tags, etc. All these tags summarize the Page content summary and help if Search Engine Optimization of your website.
Meta Tags are usually located in the top or Head of the HTML code of your website. By using Yoast Plugin on your WordPress website you can easily set Meta Tags.
Now I have a basic understanding of Meta Tags, can you please explain different types in details:
Title Tag:
The title tag is utmost important for search engine ranking and to tell the user and search engine about the title of your website content.
I make the title tags of Long Tail keywords we form during keyword research
The length of the Title tag is 70 characters exceeding which will have a bad impression on SEO search results.
Meta Description:
The description that wins the user attention is what we call Meta Description. The Meta description must contain your important keywords and should be co-relating with the Title tag.
Meta description usually contains all the keywords along with a call to action
The maximum limit is 156 characters as per Google latest update
Meta Robots Tags:
Just like we have a robots.txt file which enables/ disable crawler to crawl the website just like we have Meta Robot Tags whose functionality is written below:
Index/no index: It tells the search engine whether to show the page on its result page or not
Follow/no follow: It tells the Google crawler whether to follow the internal links on the page or not
Alt Tag:
This is very important if you want to rank high in Google search engine result. The main purpose of applying alt tag to your image is to tell Google what this image is about because Google doesn’t know what the image is about without a proper alt tag.
Header Tags:
Header Tags from H1 – H6 help Google to know what your page is about. Web pages have header tags from H1 to H6 and we apply them on our long tail keywords to frame headings or subheadings.
Where H1 is for Title and H2–H6 is for sub-headings
Canonical tags:
These tags come handy when you want to tell Google which web page to prioritize while crawling. We priority ranking if we have two web pages which might be containing similar content so to avoid penalty of having duplicate we generally use Canonical tags.
Checklist for the above discussed topics:
- We check that each web page of our website should have Meta Tags applied i.e. Title, meta description and Target URL
- The canonical tags can be useful to avoid duplicity penalty
- The Header tags must be used efficiently
- All the images of your website must contain Alt Tags
Next on the list: How to Setup Google Analytics