Meta Tags in SEO: An Ultimate Guide

Google is the most advanced and upgraded search engine that tries to give the exact same result a user is looking for. To give the best results to its users, Google is an algorithm that works hard to learn what your content is about. This is where SEO Executives come and work on Meta Tags to make things easy for search engines.

What are Meta Tags?

The meta tags are the HTML tags which are added in the header section of the source code so that the search engine can understand the content of the page.

Meta Tags play an important role when it comes to optimizing the web page, and help Google to know about the information of the web page content.

Importance of Meta Tags in SEO

Meta tags assist the search engine in determining the categories and keywords on which your content should rank. For instance, the content related to marketing ranks better in between marketing content instead of business and finance.

Basically, the meta tags of your page determine how it appears in search engine results. These tags also affect how the users view your website links on result pages. Thus, meta tags plays an important role in making the web links clickable. The better the links appear, the more the users click through them.

The search engines rank webpages based on whether they engage the target audience or not. This ultimately leads to increase in traffic and help the websites gain trustworthiness in the eyes of both search engines and users.

3 Important Meta Tags for SEO

There are several name attributes of Meta tags, and each of them is optimized with different way. The optimization of Meta tags is one of the most important On Page SEO factors.   Here are some of the important name attributes of Meta tags explained below.

Meta Title

The Meta Title is a Meta tag of HTML code in which a title of the content (of webpage) is added which helps to represent all the information in it within 60 – 70 characters. 

How to Optimize Meta Titles?

A Meta Title helps users as well as search engines to understand the information in the content. Your content needs to be optimized, though, in order to rank and be found by users and search engines. 

Meta Titles are super easy to optimize. To optimize the meta title follow the following guidelines:

Pixels/Character Limit: While it is said that meta descriptions should contain 60 to 70 characters, in reality, Google has fixed the pixel limit for meta descriptions, meaning the character limit varies depending on the alphabet. Therefore, a 60-character meta title is the best.

Keyword In-cooperation: It is important to use the exact focus Keywords in the meta title to optimize it. It gets even better if the meta title is started with the keyword itself.

Brand Name: When writing a meta title, it’s better to end on the brand name. In this way your brand name will get in most of the titles, and it will make it easy for users to identify your content.

Meta Description

The Meta Description is a meta tag in which the short summary is described about the whole content. It will make users and search engines understand what your content is actually about and what type of object is discussed in it. 

Except that it plays a big role in the metrics of CTR-(Click-Through Rate). It helps to lure the users to click on the topic once they know the information they are looking for in it. 

How to optimize the Meta Description?

Optimizing meta description doesn’t affect much, yet it is an important part in SEO. Meta description helps to get more clicks on your website. 

However, there are circumstances when the search engine doesn’t really care what you have written in it, and modifies it according to user query. 

It doesn’t really add something of its own but takes a part from the content and displays it as needed.

But still if you are looking to optimize the Meta description. Here are the guidelines:

Character Limit: The normal character limit for writing a meta description is 150 – 170 characters. As the meta title it also varies depending on what alphabets you choose. 

Keyword Usage: While writing a meta description it will be a good approach to use a long tail keyword in which the focus keyword is organically used.

Call to Action: The survey shows that the user doesn’t perform an action until it is told to do. That is why it is important to add a call to action in the meta description, which  can persuade the user to click on it.

Meta Robots

The Meta Robots meta tags help to add or remove the attribute of no-index on the webpage. It means that the web page has no-index attribute; it can only  be accessed when it is open directly or routed through the website.

The no-index tag is  usually added when there is a web page that you don\’t want the search engine to access your webpage. It usually happens when there is thin content on your webpage or when there is a page which is compulsory to be in your website but shouldn\’t exist for search engines. 

How to optimize the Meta Robots?

There is nothing much in optimizing the Meta Robots tag. The user have to take care of the webpage, which is in complete or not important in search engine but for users.

Some users have a page in their website with important information without following the search engine guidelines, such as a privacy policy, about us, or contact page.  

Such webpages are important for users to learn about webpage, however it also have qualities like thin content, paraphrased sentence or rewritten content.

Meta robots can be used to add no index tags to such pages, so that the search engine will crawl the page but not index it.  

Bottom Line

The On Page has always been an important factor in ranking. Moreover, optimizing Meta tags is the most essential technique in the checklist of on page SEO. To get a better ranking on SERPs it is important to work on Meta Tags.