A Beginner’s Guide to SEO Meta Tags – Blogsforum
The HTML code for your website includes meta tags. They aid with the understanding of information about your website by search engines. Furthermore, it affects how your website shows up in search results.
Additionally, meta tags instruct browsers how to display your website on a user’s device. In other words, they can ensure that both desktop and mobile consumers see your website properly.
This informs Google that your website is mobile-friendly. It may raise the position of your website in Google’s search results.
Therefore, meta tags are a crucial component of SEO.
We’ll go through the fundamentals of SEO and the best practises for using meta tags to improve your web pages in this guide. Additionally, you’ll discover how to make your web pages more visible to search engines so they rank higher.
How Do Meta Tags Work?
Meta tags give information about a webpage and have a direct impact on how a website is seen and displayed by search engines.
They are incorporated into the document’s header’s HTML code. Here’s an example:
<html>
<head>
<meta name="description" content="Save time & budget. Stay creative with your content while Semrush takes care of the data.">
</html>
</head>Search engines like Google may benefit from meta tag elements. The meta description used in the aforementioned example informs Google about the page. Additionally, the meta description is frequently seen in search results on Google and other search engines.
Your clients can gain from meta tags by enhancing user experience. For instance, the viewport meta element instructs the browser to render a website based on the size of the screen.
Meta tags can be of various forms. Here’s an overview of a few of the most popular ones:
- Meta descriptions
- Robot meta tags
- Viewport meta tags
We’ll also talk about title tags. Similar to meta tags, title tags aid Google in understanding the subject of your page. Google also uses your page’s title tag when presenting it in search results, much like it does with the meta description. Technically speaking, title tags are not meta tags.
A Meta Description is what?
For both online users and search engine crawlers, a meta description summarises the page’s content. On the results page of a search engine, it often displays underneath the title.
similar to this
The code for a meta description tag looks like this:
<meta name="description" content="We compiled our list of the best running shoes for 2020 and organized it by brand, category, and fit, so you can find the right shoes for your training. See which shoes made the list"/>
Making Your Meta Description SEO-Friendly
Although meta descriptions are not factored into Google’s ranking algorithm, they are nonetheless displayed as snippets in search results to improve the searcher’s accessibility.
Therefore, use meta descriptions as a tool to improve your click-through rates rather than a ranking component (CTRs). For your homepage, internal pages, and blog articles, be sure to provide imaginative descriptions that include your target keywords.
Use these recommendations to write clickable, useful meta descriptions:
- Do not exceed 160 characters.
- Make unique summaries for every page.
- On your website, avoid using duplicate meta descriptions.
- Case your sentences.
- Be precise, illustrative, and short.
- Only use your goal term where it makes sense to match the search intent.
- Your meta tags can be improved with the aid of our on-page SEO checker. Add your URL to find out if your meta tags are SEO-friendly and if your title corresponds to what is shown in search results.
How Do Robots Meta Tags Work?
Search engine robots meta tags tell them whether to crawl or index particular pages of your website. By default, search engines and web crawlers index all the pages and links you add to your website, so you may use the robots meta tag to regulate how Googlebot handles that indexing.
This is how the robots meta tag appears. It’s in your website’s header section:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
In the content attribute, you’ll include your search engine instructions.
Some typical parameters are:
Crawlers are instructed to index the page using this command. If a page is indexed, search engine users can access it. This is the default if no further code is included.
Noindex: This tells search engines not to include the webpage in their index, thus it won’t appear on the search results page.
Follow: This directs readers to other pages by enabling search engines to follow links you’ve set on your webpages. If you don’t add any arguments to the source code, this is likewise the default.
Nofollow: This tells search engine crawlers not to follow any of the links on the page and that you don’t recommend them. Some websites utilise it to reassure search engines that they don’t use spammy link tactics.
Search engines are told not to cache or display the page via the noarchive directive.
There are numerous plug-ins that are accessible if you use WordPress. To set robots meta tags, for instance, modify Yoast’s advanced option. The same choices are available with other content management systems (CMSs), like Squarespace and Wix.
SEO Robots Meta Tag Optimization
Robots meta tags limit Google’s ability to crawl a certain page on your website.
For instance, if you don’t want Google to index duplicate content, which is bad for SEO, you may use the noindex parameter.
If you don’t want Google to crawl the links on that page, you might wish to use the nofollow meta robots tag.
For instance, you might not want users to repeatedly post links to their own websites in the comments part of a page in order to obtain backlinks for their own websites.
Use our SEO Toolkit if you require more assistance or knowledge on technical SEO issues like crawlability or HTTPS security procedures. It performs more than 60 on-page and technical SEO assessments on your website. It will also highlight the most important problems that require repair, allowing you to focus on your revenue-generating pages first.
A Viewport Meta Tag: What Is It?
We first need to define a viewport in order to comprehend this part. The viewport is the user’s visible portion of the webpage in its most basic form.
Therefore, compared to someone accessing your website on a desktop computer, someone seeing it on a mobile device will see it through a significantly smaller viewport.
To make a page mobile-friendly, add the following HTML code to the head> section of your page:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
A webpage can be displayed on several screen sizes, including desktop, tablet, and mobile, thanks to the viewport meta element, which is used by browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
Additionally, it’s a crucial feature of responsive design, a technique for encoding HTML components so that they automatically alter in size and shape in accordance with the user’s browser and device.
Instantaneous page display is made possible through responsive design. Because it offers the best user experience, Google favours using responsive design to show content to mobile users.
The viewport meta tag has emerged as one of the finest SEO techniques because more than 50% of internet searches are conducted on mobile devices.
How to Improve Your Viewport SEO Meta Tags
If they’re using a mobile phone to browse your website and you only have the desktop version, they may decide to leave.
They have no need to be angry because reading and navigating can be challenging. The bounce rate on your site will rise as a result, and Google may take this as a bad sign and lower your search ranks.
Google claims that pages using responsive design are easier for it to grasp than pages not using it. Therefore, it might rank those pages higher than those that don’t use responsive design and the viewport meta tag.
What Do Title Tags Mean?
The title tag instructs search engines to display the specified title on SERPs. It can be an abbreviated version of the website’s headline.
The title tag also determines the title that will appear on the page when it is shared on social media and in browser tabs.
It is simpler for search engine crawlers to read, categorise, and rank your content if your web pages have title tags.
The title appears as follows on a browser tab and in the results of a Google search:
