SEO Meta Tags
In digital marketing, meta tags are HTML code snippets, present in the source code, that provide valuable information about search engines and users. Optimisation of Meta tags are crucial, because they help drive traffic, impact click-through rates, and increase search rankings.
How do Meta Tags work?
Meta tags help search engines understand what the content of your webpage is all about. Meta tags use the <meta> tag and are placed in the <head> section of your page.
Best Meta Tags for SEO
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- Meta Title
The meta title tells the search engine what the main heading of your page is. The title is usually the first piece of information users see before deciding to click on the site. So ensure the title is relevant to the search intent, make use of the target keyword, and keep it brief.
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- Meta Description
The meta description provides an outline of your content. Search engines display it in the snippet of the search results. It’s important because according to Google, meta description provides a short summary of the content to inform and convince users that’s what they are exactly looking for. Keep it brief, but descriptive, and relevant to search intent and keyword.
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- Meta Robots
Meta robots help search engines to decide whether they should crawl your webpages. It’s important to add the right attribute to your tags, if not, then it could lead to a negative impact for your site’s presence in search rankings. Here are the attributes to add to your tag:
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- Index: to index content
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- Noindex: to not index
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- Follow: to crawl links on the page
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- Nofollow: not to crawl links on the page
Use Meta robot only if you want Google to crawl a certain way.
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- Meta Viewport
Meta viewport lets you adjust and control the width and of the screen so it’s compatible on desktop, tablet, or mobile. This is vital, because it indicates to Google that your webpage is mobile-friendly and will rank higher in mobile search results.
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- Meta Charset
The meta charset is the specific character encoding for the HTML document. It tells the browser what character encoding to use for the web page to show desired content. Common character sets:
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- UTF-8: Character encoding for Unicode
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- ISO-8859-1: Character encoding for the Latin alphabet
If the wrong encoding is used, then certain characters will be displayed incorrectly, which can lead to bad user experience. Some problems that may arise:
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- Search engines will not comprehend content
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- No backlinks
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- High bounce rate
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- Meta Refresh Redirect
The meta refresh redirect tag tells the browser to redirect to another URL. However, it is advised you should not use them for reasons mentioned below.
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- Can confuse users
- Not supported by all browsers
- Pages need to be analyzed before seeing a different URL, which requires some time.
It’s important to also ensure you include a canonical meta tag which lets search engines know which URL is the main one, when there is a duplicate or a similar site. Therefore, it’s advised to use a 301 redirect instead.