What Are Meta Tags and How Can You Optimize Them for SEO

1. What Are Meta Tags and How Can You Optimize Them for SEO? Meta tags are code snippets that provide information about your webpages to search engines. These tags directly affect how a search engine, such as Google, views your website. For instance, search engines get to know through website meta tags how they should display your website in search results. Most of the meta tags are meant for search engine bots or crawlers. The tags also tell web browsers how to display your website to visitors. What Are The Most Important SEO Meta Tags? 1. Title Tag The title tag or meta title tells Google which title you want them to display on the SERPs. This makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl, index, and rank your content on their SERPs. Meta titles are one of the most vital SEO meta tags because these are the first things that catch a searcher’s eye. A person may read your webpage’s title and then decide to click on it and land on your website. 2. Meta Description A meta tag description is a brief summary of a webpage’s content for users and search engine bots. On Google’s SERPs, this summary appears below the title tag for each search result. Internet users read the meta description to know what the page is about and whether they should click on it to visit the website. By reading the description, they can understand if the page contains the information they are looking for. To get effective meta descriptions, follow these best practices: Each web page and blog post should have a unique meta description. Keep the description short, between 155 and 160 characters.

2. Do not write a vague or generic description. Remember, searchers might get convinced to visit your website after reading the meta descriptions. Avoid clickbait descriptions - these would only harm your brand’s reputation Write concise and accurate meta descriptions. Include your primary keyword in the description naturally. There should be only one meta description for each web page. Search engines may get confused if you insert multiple meta description tags for a page. 3. Robots Meta Tag By default, search engine bots crawl, index, and rank all the pages on your website, along with the links on those pages. The meta robots tag instructs search engines how to crawl your web pages, and tells them whether they should crawl or index a page or not. This helps you prevent duplicate content on your website and saves you from getting penalized. The syntax for the meta robots tag is: You can add this tag to your webpage’s header section. It is also crucial to understand how to use the right attributes and attribute values in the robot's meta tag. Otherwise, the wrong attributes can adversely affect your website’s ranking on the SERPs. Meta Refresh Redirect This tag instructs the browser to redirect the user to another URL after a certain period of time. However, you should avoid using these tags. This is because all browsers do not support meta refresh redirect tags. The user may also get concerned when they are redirected, doubting your website’s security. So, instead of a meta refresh redirect tag, you can use a 301 or 302 redirect.