Meta Tags in SEO: the Ultimate Guide for Beginners
Meta tags are a very important part of SEO. These tags provide important information about your website or webpage to the search engine. If meta tags are used correctly, the efforts made in SEO can be improved to a great extent and the webpage can be given a good ranking. In today’s time, SEO and content marketing are almost the same and your meta tags directly affect the search engine. Through this blog, you will be able to know how meta tags can be used and what their importance is in SEO.
What is a Meta Tag in SEO?
Meta tags are HTML tags that are placed in the <head> section of a webpage. Their primary purpose is to inform search engines about the data present on the webpage so that the search engine can crawl it properly. These tags cannot be seen by the user; only search engines can see them.
Example: <title>and<meta description>
Meta tags are available to you as a tool for search engine optimization. However, not all meta tags work the same; some tags are more important for SEO, and there are some tags that are optional in SEO and have no impact on SEO.
Importance of Meta Tags
Meta tags are very important for SEO and are a fundamental part of SEO. They optimize the page well for search engines and present your webpage well on SERP. Meta tags in SEO are as effective today as they used to be.
But experts say that these meta tags are effective only when they are used with high-quality content. But this is not true; along with the quality of the content, it is also very important for you to apply meta tags in the right place, which definitely improves your ranking.
My advice is to use only those meta tags that are necessary and don’t use those that are not necessary.
Good Meta Tags (Important Meta Tags)
These are the meta tags that should be present on every page. If you want to improve your SEO strategy, you can use basic and effective meta tags. Here are some important meta tags that should be present on every webpage.
Meta Content Type: This tag defines the character of the webpage. If you forget to put it, the page does not render properly in the browser. That is why it is very important to use this tag on the page.
Example:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
- Title Tag Title tag is the most important element of SEO. It shows the title of the page in the search engine results, which helps to attract users. Every page should have a different title tag and every tag should define the content of your page.
Example:
<title>Best title tag in SEO</title>
- Meta Description The main purpose of this tag is to describe the content of your page in search results. Although it does not boost direct ranking but it attracts users to click on the page; its length should be within 160 characters, which is a good meta description.
Example:
<meta name=”description” content=”A short and engaging description of a product, service, or idea that captures attention in 160 characters or less.!”>
- Viewport Tag: Mobile-friendly is a tag that is very important for SEO today. It is very important to make your website mobile-friendly to improve your ranking. This tag is for mobile, which helps in rendering correctly on the device.
- Indifferent Meta Tags: These meta tags are used as per the need, they are used only as per the requirement of specific users. If you feel that these are not necessary, then you can also remove them.
- Social Meta Tags: While sharing something on social media, some OpenGraph and Twitter Card meta tags are used, which do not directly affect SEO ranking. But yes, if your site is shared extensively on social media, then you should use them, which is beneficial.
- Robot Meta Tags: These meta tags are those that tell the search engine which page to index and which not to, and whether to follow the links given in that page or not. If we put noindex in it, it means that Google has been told not to index that page.
- Language Meta Tags: If you have international knowledge, then it is very important for you to use this meta tag.
- Keywords Meta Tag: This tag is quite important in old SEO practices. But in updated SEO terms, Google has deprecated it and put more emphasis on focusing on content quality and user intent.
Bad Meta Tags
Some meta tags reduce the speed of your page, which Google calls bad meta tags. If these are present in your page, you should remove them immediately:
- Author Tag: This tag has no use in SEO. This tag mentions the author of the page, which is not of much use.
- Rating Tag: Nowadays, it hardly matters to him because it checks the quality of the content.
- Revisit Tag: The work of this tag is to tell the search engine to revisit a page, but the search engine mostly ignores it, so whether it is on the page or not is the same.
- Date Tag: This tag is used to find out the expiry and creation date of the page but it does not have any important role in the search engine that affects the SEO..
- Copyright Tag: We all know that copyright information is already provided in the footer of any website page. Hence, it is very important to add this tag.
Conclusion
Meta tags are an important part of SEO, but they cannot be used everywhere and if used incorrectly, it can overload your page and reduce its ranking. You have been given information about useful meta tags, so you should only use those meta tags that optimize your page well for search engines.
In good SEO, you should focus more on content and user experience and look at meta tags as a support that focuses on their visibility. If you keep meta tags to a minimum on your page, it will have a good effect on the performance of your website and improve its ranking.
Now that you have a good knowledge of meta tags, you can optimize your web page well and get effective results.
