What Are Meta Tags and How Do They Impact SEO?
Meta tags are essential to SEO. They make up part of your HTML tags, describing the content of your web page to search engines and website visitors. Meta tags appear in the page's code.
They play a key role for search engines, appearing in the HTML code of your website page. It provides information for search engines, telling them what your web page is about. They are the first point of contact and impression for search engines.
If you want to improve your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) in 2024, you need to focus on high quality content and user experience (UX). Meta tags play a role in how the visitor sees your site in search results, helping them decide whether to click the link and be directed to your website or not.
You can check the Meta tags on your website at any time by simply right clicking anywhere on the page and selecting “view page source.” There are also free tools you can use to check the Meta tags on any website.
The most important Meta tags to focus on to boost your SEO success are:
Title tags are the first HTML element that specifies your web page for visitors and search engines. It is supported by all internet browsers including Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, along with more.
Ideally your title tag should be under sixty characters. Add your long tail keywords, you can add numbers, and you should start your title tag with your main targeted keyword. Every website page should have it's own unique title tag.
Meta Description summarises your website page. Search engines show Meta descriptions in search engines. While they are not ranking factors, they do play a role in your SEO success. The average length of meta descriptions is around one hundred and sixty characters, and one hundred and thirty characters on mobile devices.
Remember not to duplicate your meta descriptions, Google is known to choose it's own meta description that it takes from the content published. Always have a clear Call to Action in your descriptions. Targeted keywords should be placed in the description.
These are link tags used if you have a single page URL with the same content on multiple URL's. When you add the Canonical tag in the code, you tell the search engine that this is the main URL, avoiding the other duplicate pages to be indexed.
By implementing the Canonical tag in the code, we are telling search engines that this URL is the main page and avoid indexing other duplicate page URLs.
Alt tags (Alternative text) are important for images, helping search engines understand your images. Images must have informative file names that are short and to the point. Alt text should be no more than fifty five characters.
HTML tags providing instructions to crawlers on what pages to index and what not to index. There are four values for search engine crawlers, including follow, index, nofollow, and noindex.
Meta tags are HTML code that provide search engines and visitors with valuable information about your web page, driving quality traffic to your website. They are important to SEO, helping search engine crawlers crawl and index your web pages, ranking them accordingly.
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