Think about what makes you click on a website in your search results. Let’s get meta and use googling Google as an example. Pretend that you don’t know what Google is, and this pops up as the first result on the page.
How compelling is that URL? Does this stand out to you on the page?
Of course not! It doesn’t tell you anything about the business, and nothing about the name suggests it’s a search engine.
Now look at another example.
Think about how the Google search result looks now. You’ve got a description telling you exactly what Google does and you’ve got quick navigation links direct you through the site. This is much more appealing!
It’s got more context, more flair – and more SEO meta tags.
What are Meta tags?
Meta tags are snippets of HTML code that Google crawlers use to determine the value of a website. Websites that Google deems to be of higher value to searchers rank higher in the search results. Meta tags also allow you to select which information you want displayed in your search snippets like the examples above.
If you want your website to be successfully indexed and ranked by Google, you need to understand how meta tags work and use them effectively.
Are there different kinds of meta tags?
There are many different kinds of meta tags, and not all of them are created equal. They range in importance from crucial to your site’s ability to be indexed, to nice-to-have boosts to your ranking potential.
This article lists the 11 most important SEO meta tags that you’ll need to know.
The 11 most important meta tags
Here are the 11 most important meta tags that every website owner needs to know if they want their site to rank well.
1. Robots meta tags
There are two kinds of robot meta tags, noindex and nofollow, which are designed to keep the Google crawler away from certain pages or sections of your site.
Sometimes you might have pages that you know are useful for your site visitors, but that the Google crawler will penalise. An example is forums where content and links are added by a community without your moderation. Here, you would apply a robot tag to stop the crawler from seeing it, while keeping it visible to your site visitors.
The reason robot tags are so important is because you need to make sure you use them correctly. All website pages on an indexed site are crawled by default. If noindex and nofollow tags are set up incorrectly, you can accidentally block parts of your site that you wanted the crawler to see.
2. Title tags
Title tags are the titles of your web pages that will appear in your search results. Your title should be an accurate description of what the page is about, but depending on what you want it to rank for it also needs to contain the relevant keywords.
Where possible, if you make it a long-tail keyword, one that is more of a phrase than one or two words, it will be much more effective at attracting traffic. Just remember, your title should be less than 60 characters, so long-tail keywords will take up a large portion of them.
3. Meta descriptions
Remember from our Google search result example where there was a short description of the business beneath the title? Well that is the meta description, and it may just be the most important part of a search snippet.
It’s your chance to give a little bit more context about the webpage, and most people will decide whether to click your link or not based on what it says.
You need to keep your description to 160 characters, so it’s a good idea to convey the most important information as succinctly as possible. Explain what you do, how it helps the visitor, and include your keywords as well.
Another nice feature of meta descriptions is when the search query matches the text in the meta description it gets bolded. That means it’s attracting more eyes to your page, and that’s always a good thing!
4. Schema markup
If you were marketing to customers in another country, you’d make sure you translated your content into their language, right? Well schema markup is like a translation tool, except it translates your site’s content into code so that Google crawlers can read it.
In its raw form, your content is inconveniently only readable for humans, so schema converts it into structured data which crawlers can understand. This helps them know whether your content is going to be useful for searchers or not. It also helps them understand which content to prioritise when generating preview text snippets.
5. Alt text
You’ve probably uploaded images to your site and seen the alt text field when titling them. There are two reasons you should be filling it out. The first is because it’s the right thing to do, and the second is because it can help your ranking.
Alt text is a description of what’s happening in an image for people who are visually impaired, or for if the image fails to load. By not filling this out, you are seriously limiting the experience for people with additional needs. Best practice should be to always fill this out as accurately as possible.
If you need further motivation, by including a keyword in the alt text you can improve your rank. Just make sure you aren’t forcing them in if they don’t make sense. The alt text should always describe the image, if you can’t find a way to include your keyword leave it out.
6. Canonical tags
Sometimes it might be necessary to have duplicate content across your website. For example, an Ecommerce website might have products that feature in multiple categories, which would appear as duplications. While this isn’t an issue for your website users, it is an issue for Google…if you don’t use canonical tags.
Canonical tags flag one duplicate webpage URL as the only page Google needs to crawl. That saves the crawler from spending time on duplicate page content. Google sometimes ranks down sites with duplicate content because it thinks searchers will have to spend the same amount of time as it does. Canonical tags avoids this misconception.
7. Header tags (H1-H6)
Header tags are essential for telling Google exactly how you want your headings to be displayed. If you are structuring out a long webpage or a blog, these are essential.
Think about how confusing this blog would be if it didn’t have any header tags. You wouldn’t have any idea where you were, and if you left, we wouldn’t blame you!
Google knows that people feel that way, so headers improve your site’s ranking because they show that your content is organised, and that you have clearly signposted where the important information is located
8. Nofollow attributes
Nofollow attributes are tags attached to links that you don’t want the Google crawler to follow. Just like the robot tags we discussed earlier, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why you might want a low authority link on your website.
For example, if your website is a sharing platform for user generated content, the majority of this content will link to low authority domains. This would be a core function of your site, so you wouldn’t want to be penalised for it the same way a blog that leads to malware sites would be. They are completely different scenarios!
By attaching a nofollow attribute to your links, you can ensure that your users keep enjoying the community content, without plummeting down the rankings.
9. Viewport tags
Viewport tags make sure that your website is optimised for a variety of devices, not just desktop browsing. By applying a viewport tag to the head of a document or webpage, you are flagging it to Google as a page that you expect to perform for multiple devices, such as desktop, mobile and tablets.
Optimisations can include changing scales and dimensions, sound quality and even scroll sensitivity for touchscreen, touchpad or mouse. It will also adjust images to shrink or expand to match the device screen size.
10. Open graph meta tags
Open graph tags is an umbrella term for a collection of tag types that help your content be displayed correctly throughout the internet.
Originally created by Facebook, the open graph protocol was designed to make formatting universal on their platform. Open graph tags are used frequently to make sure that content appears consistently across multiple locations and channels.
You can get extremely specific, but the following are the essentials that will give you the confidence to know that your content is displaying correctly.
OG Title
The title of the object that is the subject of the graph.
OG type
This designates the format of the object, such as image, video or gif.
OG URL
This must be the canonical URL of the object that is the subject of the graph.
OG image
This is the URL for any image in your graph.
OG site name
If the object is currently also a part of a website the name of the website must be written here.
OG description
This is a sentence or two that describes the object, much like an alt text description for an image.
OG locale
This sets the predominant language and territory where the graph was created.
11. HTML link tags
If you picture a webpage as a finished house, the HTML is the timber framing holding it up. Everything, from how text is displayed, how images appear, and what version of the page to present are all determined by HTML.
But HTML is also important for how things link to and from the page. HTML link tags are short code snippets in links that affect how they appear and function. If used correctly they are also great for improving your ranking.
There are plenty you can learn, but the most important ones are listed here.
Href
A href attribute is used to denote the destination of the link.
Hreflang
This affects what language the destination page should be displayed in, so if you have a brand that serves different countries, you can tailor the language of the page to match the region of the user.
Alternate
Alternate links lead to alternate versions of the destination document, such as a translated version when paired with an hreflang tag.
Bookmark
Bookmarks a certain section of the destination page and directs the user straight to it.
Search
The search tag directs to a tool that can be used to search the document or webpage.
Need help with your meta tags?
If this list is overwhelming, we don’t blame you! Thankfully, at RankUp, our experts are all across these tags and can apply them to help your website soar up the rankings.
We’ll conduct a review of your site and make sure that all the required tags are applied. All you need to do is get in touch.
