Meta Tags Optimization
Discover the best practices of curating SEO-friendly meta tags to optimize our page’s appearance on SERPs and increase its ranking.
What are meta tags?
Meta tags aren’t visible on the web page. They are pieces of information in the HTML code of the page that communicate important data about the web page directly with the search engines. In particular, meta tags tell the search engine how the page should appear in search results.
We might already be familiar with title tags and meta descriptions. Though these are the most popular ones, there are others too.
Here’s what a meta tag code looks like:
<title>What Is Adult Dry Dog Food?</title><meta name= "description” content= "Learn all about adult dry dog food here. The varieties available and suggestions on what suits your dog”./><meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
With the above meta tags, here’s how the page may appear in search results.
Sometimes Google will display some part of the page in place of the description tag to build a better connection with the search query.
Are meta tags important for SEO?
There’s plenty of confusion on what meta tags have to do with SEO. Do they have any impact on the search engine rankings for the site?
Strictly speaking, a page’s ranking has more to do with the quality of content and user satisfaction than meta tags.
Google itself says that their algorithms have evolved past the point when meta tags mattered substantially and tweaking them with the right keywords could change rankings [10]. In the same video uploaded in 2012, Matt Cutts says that disregarding meta tags completely is taking things too far. Google does not use the ‘keywords’ meta tag; it’s not recommended to spend time on it.
However, the search engine may use other tags, like description, if it satisfies the search query. Google provides documentation on the meta tags it understands and uses [11]. Other search engines might use other tags too.
Since certain meta tags control the way our page appears in search results, they impact a user’s decision on whether they click through to our site, or scroll past. By affecting click-through rates, meta tags are indirectly linked to ranking, and are, therefore, important for SEO.
Points to ponder
Are all meta tags important for SEO?
Four meta tags to optimize
Here are the four important meta tags that we would want to optimize for SEO:
Meta title
The meta title, also called title tag or meta title tag, does not start with the element “meta” but it still appears in the <head> section of our HTML page. Similar to meta tags, it has a simple format that looks like this:
<title>How To Choose The Best Canned Dog Food</title>
Title tags are critical to SEO since they occupy a prominent position on the search snippet for our page on SERPs. They are often the deciding factor for whether or not a searcher will click on the page or not.
By creating unique, descriptive, and concise title tags, optimized for the relevant keywords, we can tell the users what the content is about and how it’s relevant to their query. Too many keywords can be taken as a signal for keyword stuffing by search engines and look spammy to users.
Keep the title length within 60 characters. Anything longer may be truncated in search results, depending on whether it’s viewed on a desktop or mobile browser.
Note: In a developer’s language, a meta title is not a meta tag, but metadata of the page. All meta tags are metadata, but the converse is not true.
Meta description
Meta description is a preview of our content for searchers. Google will often display it in the search snippet for the page, just under the page title.
In the HTML code of the page, the meta description tag appears in the <head> section as follows:
<meta name="description" content="We compared the top dog food brands in the market and generated a list for you to choose from. Take a look at the best options to feed your hungry puppy.">
While Google explicitly states that “they won’t affect your ranking within search results”, they are important to SEO nonetheless [12]. Google aims to optimize the experience for its users. When it finds a good meta description that accurately answers the searcher’s query, it will display that description in the search snippet. In case the meta description is not available or does not match the user’s interest best, Google generates a description using parts of our page.
Spending time writing a good meta description can benefit us in situations where Google does choose to display it in the search snippet. In such cases, a description that tells the searcher that our page better satisfies their interest than other results in the SERPs can compel them to click on the link.
A good rule of thumb is to keep meta descriptions within 155 to 160 characters long, otherwise, there’s a risk that Google will truncate it in search results. Though Google experimented briefly with longer descriptions in 2017, it reverted the change the next year. As of now, it’s best to keep the descriptions under 160.
Generate concise meta descriptions, relevant to the page’s content and appealing to the users. Make sure they are unique for each page on our site. As with the title tag, including the target keyword logically can help, but avoid keyword stuffing.
Meta robots
The robots meta tag tells the search engine whether or not it should index a page and follow links on it. Additionally, it also controls certain features of the snippet for the page in search results. Using the tag incorrectly can be detrimental to our SEO efforts.
Not using the tag at all is safe in most situations since Googlebot indexes and follows every page by default. In the absence of meta robots tag, Google follows the following syntax:
<meta name=”robots” content="index, follow">
This means that if we want the search engines to index the page and follow links on it, there’s no point in specifying meta robots tag at all. We will only need to include it in the HTML code if we want to change these parameters.
For example, look at the following code snippet:
<meta name=”robots” content="nofollow">
It tells the search engines not to crawl links on it. Note that the search engine will still index the page. If we want to specify the bots not to index and crawl the page, we will type the following:
<meta name=”robots” content="noindex,nofollow">
Why would we want to use the robots tag?
In most situations, we don’t need to use it. It’s only useful in some situations. For example, we may specify nofollow for a page if there’s a comment section and we don’t want commenters to take backlinks from your page. There are also cases where a page is important to the website but the webmaster doesn’t want it to appear in SERPs, possibly because the content is outdated. In that case, we may want to use noindex.
There are other directives too. Some common parameters we can specify in the robots tag include:
Parameter | Description |
| It’s a default setting that tells search engines to index the page. |
| By setting the content value in the robots tag to |
| It’s a default setting that tells bots to follow links on the page and discover the linked content. |
| By setting this parameter, we will prevent the bots from crawling the page. |
| It tells the search engine not to index the page and not to crawl links on it. It is the same as |
| It prevents bots from caching the page. As a result, search engines are prevented from showing a cached copy of the page in search results. |
| It prevents the bots from displaying text snippets or video previews of the page in search results. |
A word of caution: Webmasters often take the
nonedirective to meanindex, followand unintentionally block search engines from their pages, resulting in a drastic fall in their site’s SEO performance.
Meta viewport
Where mobile accounts for around half of the web traffic worldwide as of 2021, according to Statista [13], don’t forget to make our pages mobile-friendly. The viewport tag controls the visible area of the webpage on different screen sizes, such as desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Here’s the standard setting that we should paste into the head section of all pages on our website:
<meta name=viewport content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
We can use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test service to check if our page is mobile-friendly.
Test your knowledge
Choose the correct option for the following question.
Which directive in the “robots” meta tag tells search engines not to crawl links on the page but still index the page?
index
noindex
follow
nofollow
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