SEO or search engine optimization has taken the digital marketing industry by storm. An SEO optimized website can bring in organic traffic and helps you in increasing the visibility of your webpage.
But how does SEO work? SEO helps Google in identifying if your page is relevant to the search made by the user. If your website has the keywords or the words typed by the user in the query then your page will have a higher ranking than the websites who are less relevant to the query or aren’t Search engine optimized. One of the best ways to make your website apt according to search is using the Meta tag.
There are a lot of different types of tags available on web but following are four major that we are going to discuss in this article.
These Meta tags are of 4 types-
- Meta Keywords Attribute– Contains keywords relevant to the query but they are not beneficial anymore. They don’t affect the ranking of your page in any way.
- Title Tag– This is the clickable blue part of your result; Search Engine view them as the title of your webpage. They are the most important meta tag to improve your page’s search engine ranking.
- Meta Description Attribute– This tag is responsible for giving a brief description of what the website is about. This tag is visible under the Meta Keywords Attribute and gives the search engines as well as searchers more idea about the content of the web page. They also give additional incentive for the user to visit the website. If we don’t define Meta description tag then the search engine replaces it with the first two lines of your article/content.
- Meta Robots Attribute– They direct the search engine bots or crawler on what they should do with the page. The robot tag helps in controlling how the search engine index snippets of your website. In simple terms, it directs the engines on what pages you want them to look at and what pages they shouldn’t follow.
The Body Tag is the visible part of your website content where you can see the keywords clearly but Meta Tags are the tags which do not appear on the page itself. The meta tag stores metadata which simply means information about the data. The metadata gives more specifics about the website, for example, the name of the author, type of the web page, character set, viewport (specified dimension), who is the owner of the copyright etc. You can see these metadata by viewing the page source code.
How can you use meta tags on your website?
In HTML <meta> tag is used to store metadata. Here’s one way you can use meta tags (here meta description and title tag) in your HTML document under the head tag.
<head>
<title>Your choice of title for your webpage<titile>
<meta name=” name of this meta tag” description=” contains your relevant keywords and lets the user know what the website is about”>
<meta >
</head>
You can also use meta tags to tell search engines what language is used!
For example, if a person is searching an article in Spanish and you have mentioned Spanish in the meta tag then it becomes easier for search engine bots/spiders to sort among web pages and keep your web page in results.
Keep in mind that the title tag is the most essential tag to improve the ranking of your web page, rest of meta tags tell us what the website is actually about which in turn increases relevancy for the users.
It’s possible to write all the pertinent keywords in the body content but it might dilute the quality of the article, hence Meta tags are a good opportunity for anyone to increase their traffic and at the same time not compromise on the content of their websites. These tags are an excellent way to communicate with search engine bots to provide them additional information, specify when and how they should rank it, tell them to which user base the content of the website is relevant to etc.
CONCLUSION
Most of the meta tags are used so that the user, as well as the search engine, understands what this website is all about. Title tags are the most important tags to improve the ranking of your page. Using robot meta tags will ensure that your page is indexed in the way you would prefer it to and is displayed to the right user. These tags act as directives to the search engine bots and increase relevancy to the query.