For the average person visiting your website, meta tags are not visible. While this is true, it does not mean they are not crucial to your digital marketing strategy, along with your organic search optimization campaigns.
Unfortunately, there are far too many people who ignore the importance of these tags and what they offer to your website.
Meta Tags Defined
A meta tag is a hidden snippets of text that is found in the HTML code for your website. Many describe them as the essential elements of SEO, and they have been around since the beginning of the internet.
The goal of meta tags is to offer context to search engines to quickly understand what the site is about and which keywords are being optimized. Keep in mind, though, that meta tags are not just for the SEO “techies,” they are something that every marketer should use.
Metadata optimization is actually easier to understand that you may think, especially since most of the Modern Content Management systems (CMS) provide add-ons that can be implemented easily.
Types of Meta Tags
There are a few different types of meta tags that you may see or deal with. These include:
- Page title – also called metal title or title tag
- Page description – also called the metal description or description tag
- Robots tag
- Canonical tag
- Image tags
- Schema
- Header tags – H1, H2, H3
Now that you know what the different types of meta tags are, it is time to learn more about using them to improve your site.
Leverage the CMS Platform You Use
The good news is that you do not have to learn HTML code to add these meta tags to your website. Instead, your website (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, etc.) should be able to accommodate adding these tags on the back end of things.
Check the Length
With meta tags, search engines such as Google will only show a few pixels. The precise character count or word length to write for your titles and descriptions is dependent on the letters you are using.
It is best to limit your title tags to about 50 to 65 characters and your meta descriptions to just 160 to 170 characters, including the spaces. If you exceed this word count, you are not going to be penalized; however, the tag is going to be cut off.
Use Relevant Keywords in Your Meta Tags
Every page on your site needs a minimum of one keyword or a key phrase that summarizes what the content covers. The keyword should be a term that a real person would likely enter into a search engine.
When it comes to writing SEO meta tags and ensuring they are useful, there are many things to consider. Keep the information here in mind to minimize problems and feel confident you will get the desired results from the information that you have provided to search engines. If necessary, reach out to the professionals for help and information.