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Many factors influence effective SEO of a website While focusing on optimizing your site technically, analyzing the code, and other on-site activities, you should not forget about the basic elements that are appropriate meta tags.
What are meta tags and do they really affect the position of a site?
What are meta tags?
In order for a search engine robot to identify what’s in a page’s code, it must recognize the type of information we’re giving it. Meta tags are a kind of message describing the content of a given web page.
Correctly written in the HTML code and unique for each subpage, tags are an important element in the SEO process.
Additionally, they are also important from the user’s point of view. Some of them are displayed in search results and the title of the page and provide information about whether the site is worth visiting and what is on it.
Therefore, it is necessary to take care of their content and the correctness of the data they convey in order to best attract users’ attention and encourage them to enter the site.
There are many meta tags, but several of them play a special role in the SEO process. Let’s take a closer look at them.
What meta tags should you pay attention to when positioning a website?”
Meta Title
The page title is the element that first draws attention to itself in displayed search results. It is also the primary HTML tag, specifying the name of the page in question.
His place in the code is right next to the most important information – the coding method, the language used on the page and other equally important meta tags. Properly implemented, the title appears in the name of the browser tab.
The title appears in the name of the browser tab.
Basic rules for creating a Title are primarily:
- optimal length of between 60 and 70 characters,
- presence of keywords related to the content and content of a given subpage,
- uniqueness and originality,
- title ending with the brand name, in order to link the page to the brand name
Meta Description
Description is a tag that describes the content of your site. It displays in search results directly below the Title, so it is a great complement to it.
A few years ago, the phenomenon of keyword stuffing broke into SEO, which manifested itself in excessive, ill-considered saturation of the description tag with keywords. At some point, Google’s robots started treating this as spam.
Today, this tag is not a ranking factor, but it certainly affects the interest of users in a given site. So it is worthwhile to optimize its content accordingly.
Today, this tag is not a ranking factor.
What to keep in mind?
- The length of the description should not exceed 150-160 characters with spaces
- using keywords in the right context will affect the position of the site
- including a message Call to action will encourage users to go to the site and interact or make a purchase
- emoji or pictograms make search results look more attractive and draw user attention
It is worth noting that if you do not complete the meta Description tag, the search engine will choose its own, taking into account the snippets of text on the page.
The search engine’s choice is not always the most optimal, so it is all the more important to create a description that will help us best encourage users to enter the site.
Meta keywords
Keywords are an extremely important element in the SEO process of a website. They define the subject matter of the site, draw attention to the content of the site, and allow you to better match your search results to the queries and intentions of your audience.
A few years ago, what was placed in meta keywords influenced the thematic linking of a site, but this has not been taken into account for some time.
In 2009, according to an official statement issued by Google, the meta keywords tag ceased to be a ranking factor and its content is irrelevant in the SEO process.
The addition of the tag is not considered an error, but it also does not bring any benefit to the site in terms of SEO.
Meta robots
From an SEO perspective, this is a very important tag. Its most important function is to tell search engine robots which pages should be indexed and displayed in search results.
Robots tag contains relevant directives that, when identified, determine the sub-pages and how they should be displayed in the search engine.
The most commonly used directives include:
- noindex <meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”> – specifies pages that should not be indexed in a search engine. It is most commonly used for pagination, filtering or sorting subpages, and for pages related to privacy policy and site login
- nofollow <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> – tells robots not to go to the address specified in the link, so it does not pass power to the target site,
- noimageindex <meta name=”robots” content=”noimageindex”> – directive telling robots not to index the graphics on the page
- noarchive <meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”> – directive telling robots not to cache copies of the page
Defining the robots meta tag, we can combine individual directives (e.g., „noindex, nofollow”).
An alternative to the meta robots tag is to place the directives in the robots.txt file But make sure that the messages contained in the tag and in the file are the same. Sending conflicting information to the robots will certainly harm the position of our site, so it is worth paying attention.
How to plan and implement meta tags
To get good SEO results, you need to develop a strategy and plan meta tags and their content.
The content of the title and description should be unique and point to the content of the subpage. It is worth doing keyword analysis and planning the tags before implementing them on the site to avoid unnecessary duplication.
Implementation of meta tags depends on CMS and the plugins a site uses. Among the most popular is the Yoast SEO plugin used in WordPress. With this plugin, we can supplement or edit meta descriptions.
In addition, the plugin monitors and evaluates our activities, so we can control the status of our site and take advantage of prompted suggestions for optimizing the site for SEO. Most of the functionality of the plug-in is free, which further encourages us to install it in the panel WordPress
Sites based on the Magento system can use the Mageworx Seo Suite Ultimate module. It has a lot of functionality in it that is sure to be helpful in optimizing your site for SEO. In addition to the options for entering structured data, optimizing content or using category templates, we can, of course, take care of basic elements such as meta data thanks to it.
Some CMS have an option to automatically generate meta data. These include, for example IdoSell and PrestaShop The generated data is unique for each subpage, so it does not cause duplication and is properly optimized from an SEO perspective. The automatic process of creating meta data significantly improves work and saves time.
Summary
Meta tags are basic elements placed in the code of a page, which should be taken care of in the optimization process. It is worth paying attention to their length, saturation with keywords and appropriate directives in the case of meta robots tag.
Plugins and modules appropriate for the CMS on which the site is based can be helpful.
In addition to title, description, keywords and robots tags, there are many others. However, the ones described above are the most popular and relevant from an SEO perspective.
