Here are what you are going to learn in this piece:
- What is a meta tag?
- Why meta tags are important
- Why meta tags are important
- How meta tags impact your website in terms of visibility
- The best way to use meta tags
Meta tags exist only in HTML, meaning they are contained in the codes of web pages or posts. They are usually located at the head of a HTML page where search engine bots can read and apply significance to them. And they are crafted for the use of both human users and search engines.
What is a Meta Tag?
Meta tags are short, descriptive texts that website owners create to describe what a web-page is really about. Website users may not really see meta tags, but search engines do. In fact, meta tags are created more for search engines than they are for human readers. Meta stands for metadata, meaning page data revealed by tags.
In case you want to see the meta tags of a particular website page, just right-click on any part of the page and then select “View Page Source” to see the metadata displayed as a pop-up or in another window depending on your browser.
Why Meta Tags Are Important
Are meta tags really important for your website? Yes they are, but some parts of the metadata carry more weight than others. To better understand this, let us differentiate four parts of a meta tag among others and then assign some level of weight to them in overall website visibility.
- Meta keywords attribute: This is a string of keywords intentionally inserted into a page to describe its content and significance. Since this attribute has led to keyword stuffing, Google devalued its importance and stuffing posts with keywords is now useless.
- Title tag: Just as the name indicates, the text or title put to show at the top of your browser for search engine results pages are title tags. They are very important to search engines because they are visible to both humans and bots.
- Meta description attribute: This part describes to search engines what a web post or page is all about. It is visible to humans when Google displays search results, and the way it is crafted can make people to click on them to arrive at your web pages – thereby increasing targeted traffic.
- Meta robots attribute: This attribute instructs search engines whether to crawl your pages and posts or not, and whether to trace your inserted links or not.
How Meta Tags Impact Your Website In Terms of Visibility
Do meta tags increase your website visibility? Well, they maybe they do. But not as they used to a decade ago. Meta tags are essentially crafted to pull targeted traffic with the aid of search engines. And to increase page-ranking. But this may not be effective at all times. This is largely because Google has devalued meta tags, and it cannot be solely relied upon for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Yet they serve their purposes in the overall SEO benefits.
The Best Way to Use Meta Tags
Is there really a best way to use meta tags? Maybe by knowing what works and what does not. The best advice here is to know your audience and then write quality content that serves their needs. You may then apply a few SEO tricks giving importance to parts of the meta tags attributes that still work, and then trusting search engines to do what they do best. It will also help to make your meta tags descriptive of your overall content, containing relevant keywords that will attract traffic and help your content rank in search engines.