Meta tags are attached with content to make it understandable for the crawler to rank the content as per its quality, relevancy, and optimization and accordingly show in SERP.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are tags that provide data about your page to search engines and website visitors.
They help search engines to determine what your content is about and thus are vital for SEO.
Meta tags give descriptions that enable the user as well as a search engine to get a brief idea of the website’s content. Meta tags are not visible on the search page. Google has put some restrictions on the website owners while writing the meta tag description.
The title tag has a word limit of 60 characters and description tags have a limit of 160 characters. URLs are also attached to these descriptions.
Types of Meta Tags:
Following are the types of meta tags:
Meta Keyword Attributes :
Meta keyword attributes are the group of keywords that are related to your content. When you upload content on your website, your content should have a few keywords that you have mentioned in the meta description. These keywords indicate the content’s authentication.
Keywords with the content are readable for a web crawler.
Title tag:
The title tag is visible at the top of the browser in SERP. In most of the cases, this tag is the heading or name of your website. It gives the first impression when it comes to user experience. By seeing the title tag, the user decides whether the title tag is justifying their search that is whether or not to click on the page. It has a word limit of 60 characters. It should not be too long and website owners should try to optimize it by using relevant and logical keywords.
Meta Description:
A meta description is nothing but a brief description of the content of your website. It gives a brief idea to the user about what the website contains. Meta description decides the rank of your website so it can’t be ignored. It should contain some groups of keywords that are related to your content. It should be in short and it can be anything about your content like important facts or why the user should use your website.
URL's:
URL is nothing but the link attached to your website or webpage.
URLs are used by web crawlers to index your website.
Therefore use the relevant keyword for your URLs because it also gives credibility to users that they have reached a correct and relevant website. Use keywords in the continuation and avoid using punctuation to give the user a correct view of your website.
Use of SEO Online Tools:
Sometimes it may happen that the selection of your tags or keywords goes wrong that can affect your SEO, so to minimize this risk Google offers some online tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Google Trends, etc.
These tools contain various features that will improve your content and tags.
These tools contain various features that will improve your content and tags.
How Meta Tags Helps in SEO:
When a web spider of search engine finds any data on the internet then its first task is to categorize the content and rank it after comparing and analyzing with a huge amount of data present on that particular search engine. Meta tags show content originality, reliability and above all its quality. When a keyword search is done with optimized meta tags can generate commendable results. If the metadata is attached and linked with the content in a proper format, then web spiders will raise your content’s ranking in SERP. But if these tags are copied from somewhere else then Google or any other search engine can penalize the website and it can be banned forever.
How to Write a Good Meta Description:
Following are some ways which will help you to write a good meta description:
- Don't use too hard language, use simple language.
- The meta description should be able to justify what exactly the website is about.
- It should be under a specified limit which is 155 characters.
- A call to action can also be included.
- The description should include relevant keywords.
- It should be unique and should match the content.