Essential Meta Tags for Optimizing Your Website’s SEO
Meta tags are snippets that describe the content of a web page. They don’t appear on the page itself but appear in the source code.They are commonly used to define page descriptions, keywords, document authors, modified documents, and other metadata.
Meta tags have a significant impact on on-page optimization; however, some of them are more relevant for SEO than others. Here are some essential Meta tags for optimizing your website’s SEO.
Title Tag
The title tag is the most important anchor, as it is a major factor in helping search engines understand what the page is about. It appears as the clickable header of the snippet on a web page and also appears on social networks and browsers.
These are the most important tags that have a real impact on the search engine rankings. Every web page should have a unique and separate title tag to reap SEO benefits.
Title tags are positioned in the <head> of your webpage. For instance, if you view the HTML for this article, you’ll see the title as follows:
<title>Essential Meta Tags for Optimizing Your Website’s SEO</title>
A well-crafted title tag encourages more clicks and increases traffic to a site, which has an impact on rankings. Not only this, they also function as a tab title in your web browser. Here highlighted text represents the title tag in the picture given below:
Best practices
- Write a unique title for each web page of a website;
- Be clear and concise.
- Use sentence case or title case;
- Match search intent;
- Include your target keyword in a way that makes sense.
- Keep it under 60 characters.
Meta Description Tag
Meta description tags appear in the <head> of a webpage. They are usually displayed in a SERP snippet along with a title and page URL. For instance, this is the Meta description for this article is as follows:
<meta name=”description” content=” Some of them are more relevant for SEO than others. Here we are talking about some essential Meta tags for optimizing your website’s SEO.
Meta tags give you a unique opportunity to increase click-through rates and polish your brand’s SERPs. However, Meta descriptions themselves are not a ranking factor.These tags give a brief idea of what the website is about. The word limit for the Meta description is around 10–160 characters so that it can fit on the SERP. Here is how Meta description tags appear in SERPs:
Best practices
- A unique and catchy Meta description should be provided for each web page.
- Avoid generic meta descriptions;
- Use keywords in a way that makes sense.
- Use sentence case;
- It should match search intent;
- Keep it under 160 characters.
Canonical Tag
A canonical tag is an HTMLlink tag with the attribute “rel=canonical.” It is used to indicate that there are other versions of the given web page. It is a way of telling search engines which version of a page you consider the main one and would like to be indexed by search engines and found by people.
When the canonical tag is implemented in the code, it is indicated by the website to the search engines that this URL is the main page and that the engines shouldn’t index other pages.
It is commonly used when there are several pages with similar information that cover the same topic or when the same page is available under several different URLs. It helps Google and other search engines distinguish between pages with unique content and duplicate material. By doing this, the original content is given the correct authority and rating without being penalized for having a duplicate page elsewhere.
Given syntax can be used to add a canonical tag:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/Code sample
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.eslrankspro.com/esl-ranks-pro-guide-on-using-the-advanced-rank-tracking-tool-to-elevate-your-seo-game/" />Here The rel = canonical tag in action and indicates that page on which this tag appears should be treated as a duplicate of the specified URL.
Best practices
- Only specify One Canonical URL Per page.
- Use self-referential canonical tags.
- Canonicalize your home page
- Use lower-case URLs.
- Use the meta viewport tag on all web pages;
- Specify the correct Domain Protocol.
- Specify trailing slash or non-trailing slash URLs.
- Specify Non-WWW or WWW URLs.
- Use Absolute URLs to prevent errors.
- Point to pages in the same language.
4. Image Alt Attributes
The image alt attribute is added to an image tag to describe the image. If any particular image cannot be loaded or images are disabled, Alt text is displayed to visitors. It is also known as “alt attributes,” “alt descriptions,” or “alt tags.”
It helps screen reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers. It is crucial for on-page optimization as it provides context, as search engines can’t “see” images.
Whether you perform SEO or not, optimizing your website’s image alt text helps you create a better user experience for your website visitors.
Best practices
- It should be short and descriptive.
- Add context related to the topic of the page.
- Keep the alt text to fewer than 125 characters.
- Avoid including “image of” or “photo of”.
- If the image is purely decorative, leave the alt text blank.
- It’s not necessary to add text in the Title field.
- Add alt text to all non-decorative images.
- Don’t stuff your keyword into every single image’s alt text.
- Review for spelling errors.
- Don’t add alt text to every image.
Read More about How to add alt attributes
Robots Meta Tag
Robot Meta tags indicate to search engines toeither index or not index your web page. In other words, they tell search engine robots how to crawl. Index and display your page content. It is placed in the <head> section of the page and usually looks like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
In the above example, the meta tag tells robots not to index the page.
Here is an example of ESearch Logix’s robot.txt file.
Sitemap: https://www.esearchlogix.com/sitemap_index.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /submenus/
Disallow: /blog/_private/
Disallow: /blog/awstats/
Disallow: /eslblog/tag/
Disallow: /blog/cgi-bin/
Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/
Disallow: /blog/trackback/
Disallow: /blog/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /blog/search/
Disallow: /blog/rss/
Disallow: /blog/comments/
Disallow: /blog/comments/feed
Disallow: /blog/*/trackback/
Disallow: /blog/feed/$
Disallow: /blog/*/feed/$
Robots meta directives offer more specific instructions on how to crawl and index a page’s content than robots.txt file directives, which offer advice to bots on how to crawl the pages of a website.
Robots meta directives are of two types: those that are sent by the web server as HTTP headers (like x-robots-tag) and those that are embedded in HTML pages (like the meta robots tag).
Meta robots and the x-robots tag both allow the usage of the same parameters; the only difference is how those parameters are sent to crawlers.
Best practices
- Meta robot tags should only be used when intendedtorestrict the way Google crawls a page.
- The txt file should be placed in the root directory of your website so that search engine crawlers can easily find it.
- Avoid blocking pages with Meta robots tags in robots.txt.
- Ensure you don’t mistakenly restrict important pages from indexing.
- Close unnecessary pages with thin content with little or no value or intent to appear in the SERPs.
6. Open Graph Meta Tags and Twitter Cards
Open Graph Meta Tags look similar to Twitter card tags and are also regarded as social media tags. They act as a bridge between the content and your audience.
These tags are small snippets of code that are part of Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and are also recognized by Twitter and LinkedIn.
These codes signify how your website URLs are displayed on social media and other messengers. In other words, they help to make your content more noticeable and shareable on social media.
OG tags are generally indicated by the og: meta property found in the <head> section of a webpage, something like this:
- Use only canonical URLs for the og:url property.
- Keep the OG title short (without a brand name) with 60 characters for desktop and 40 for mobile.
- Keep the description within 2-4 sentences and use a meta description if it makes sense.
- Create custom OG images for shareable pages and use a logo or brand image for the other pages.
- Use images at 1200 x 630 to retain quality across all devices.
7. Heading Tags
Heading tags are HTML tags that separate headings and subheadings from other forms of text (like paragraph text) within your content.
These days, there is some debate surrounding the use of heading tags in SEO. However, these tags are useful for users as they give them a preview of the content.
They enhance the readability of the content by organizing and giving it structure. When there are proper headings, it makes it easy for the visually impaired to navigate the content.
- H1 tags are used to indicate the most important text on a page, such as the main theme or title of a piece of content.
- H2 and H3 tags are typically used for subheadings.
- Finally, H4, H5, and H6 tags may be used to provide for further subheadings if required in a text.
Best practices
- Use header tags to provide structure.
- Craft unique and SEO-aligned headings.
- Include keywords in your header tags.
- Maintain consistency in the header tags.
8. Viewport Meta Tags
The term “view port meta element” also applies to responsive design Meta tags. It enables web designers to customize how a website renders and scales on any screen.
The visible area of a web page is set using the meta viewport tag. It is used to give the browser instructions on how to display the website on various screen sizes, including desktop, tablet and mobile. The tag and its value commonly appear as follows:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″/>
Viewport meta tag has nothing to do with SEO, but it has a huge impact on the user’s experience as it ensures that the site displays well on all devices.
It should also be kept in mind that Google ranks mobile-friendly web pages higher in mobile search results. Neglecting your viewport can have a negative impact on your CTR and bounce rate.
Best practices
- Use meta viewport tag on all web pages;
- Use the “standard” tag unless you know what you’re doing
- Don’t use absolute width values in your CSS such as cm, mm, in, px, pt, or pc.
- Ensure the viewport width is set to ‘device-width’
- Every single web page should employ the meta viewport tag.
- Set the initial-scale value to 1.0to prevent users from unnecessarily zooming in or out
- Make sure that user-scalable is set to 0 to prevent people from scaling your page
9. Schema markup
Schema markup is a technique to organize data on each webpage in such a way that it is noticed and recognized by search engines. It empowers rich snippets, which usually have higher click-through rates than regular search results.
When a snippet has a relevant and appealing image, a 5-star rating, a specified price range, or any other useful information, it is more likely to get clicked than plain text results.When you have a structured schema markup, it has many benefits such as :
- It enables users to get more relevant search results.
- It has a positive impact on SEO.
- It makes your SERP snippet rich in information that is helpful and appealing for users.
Best SEO Practices
- Analyze the available schemas on schema.org.
- A map of the most important pages should be created.
- Markup should be implemented carefully (using the Structured Data Markup Helper if required).
- Evaluated the markup thoroughly to ensure it is not misleading.
- One should use JSON-LD (instead of microdata or RDFa), as recommended by Google.
- Make sure to markup only what is on the page.
- There should be one key page for each business concept.
- Connect “things” in schema markup.
- Refer to Wikipedia or websites to define topics.
SEO is much more than link building and adding high-volume keywords to your content. A lot of things happen behind the scenes to make it work for your website to reach higher rankings. Meta tags are the most fundamental part of SEO, though some of them are more relevant than others.
When you ensure Meta tags are appropriately added and optimally optimized, they help to improve the user experience, make search engines better understand your site, and consequently give you an edge over your competitors.
It is not hard to implement Meta-tags yourself. You don’t need to be a programmer; you just need some knowledge and experience for using HTML. ESL Ranks Pro can guide you on using the Advanced Rank Tracking Tool to Elevate Your SEO Game. Explore ESL Rank Pro Tool Today.
