What Are Meta Tags And How Do They Work?
If you have hired or work alongside a content marketer or copywriter, you will have heard them throwing terms like ‘SEO’, ‘Meta Data’ and ‘Meta Tags’ around. More often than not, these are things that are integrated in the background without much high-level business involvement - however, knowing what meta tags are and how they support SEO is an important part of building and marketing your business online.
And so, in this article we will be introducing the power of meta tags, what they do and how they work for small and large businesses.
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta Tags are sometimes overlooked (by those who don’t know how important they are), because they provide data from behind the scenes. In fact, they’re so far behind the scenes that they’re completely hidden from the webpage, with only the developer and writer aware that they are there at all.
The role of Meta Tags is to let search engines know what your webpage is about - and that’s what links them so closely to SEO and the importance of making each and every webpage Search Engine Optimised.
In terms of placement, Meta Tags sit in thesection of your HTML document and are coded into the CMS (Content Management System) of each page on your website. If you use a template-based platform like WordPress to create your website than adding your Meta Tags is easier than this because the backend design page will provide you with a dedicated box to enter your tags, however if you are building the website from scratch then Meta Tags are something you will need to give to the developer to implement correctly.
Why Are Meta Tags Important?
Meta Tags are a bit like proof of your website content in the eyes of search engines and will be used by these search engines to determine if your website is relevant according to users’ search terms. As such, it is important that your meta tags contain a collection of broader terms relating to your business or industry, and more specific terms that relate to specific webpages.
By giving search engines this crucial information about the content and quality of your webpages and overall website, you give them the assurance to show your website as a search result for a specific search - and thus encourage users to click through to your site as part of their ongoing customer journey. This tells us everything we need to know about the importance of Meta Tags in a business sense - without them, search engines wouldn’t rank your site highly and users wouldn’t find your website through their online search.
Simple. Now onto using and implementing the right Meta Tags into your own site.
Use Meta Tags To Optimise Your Website
The Title Tag
The first and most important tag is the title tag, not only used behind the scenes in telling search engines what your webpage is about, but also pulling through to provide the title for the webpage whenever it’s shared on social or as part of an integrated email link.
With an ideal length of 55 characters or less, the title tag should be clear and concise and literally provide a heading which pulls the entire webpage and its value together in one title.
TOP TIP: If you can include a keyword or location, great, as this will aid your SEO and any local search tags.
Meta Description
This sits below the Meta Title Tag and provides you with a few more characters in allowance, in order to boost the title and provide further insight into the value and content contained within a single webpage. When you pull a link through to social or email, this is the description text you see below the webpage title tag, so is of equal importance both to users and to search engines.
In short, this should be a concise but accurate description of the webpage and should ideally contain at least one keyword for SEO purposes.
Robots Meta Tag
These tags are purely for background purposes, and essentially tell a search engine whether or not you want a webpage to be indexed and linked with search terms or not. If you have a webpage which is useful as part of your overall website journey but adds little in the way of standalone content, a robot meta tag can tell the search engine now to trawl and index that specific page for search results.
Alt Text
Alt text is attached to any visual or image you post on your website and provides additional support for your SEO strategy as well as presenting users with a description of an image if that image doesn’t load.
Again, it tells search engines that everything on your webpage is relevant and adds value and forms an important part of allowing that search engine to rank your site as credible.
Canonical Tag
This is the information that lets a search engine know when you have duplicate or similar content on two webpages, or when a blog you have posted has also been posted somewhere else - saving your site from being penalised for duplicating content. This tag lets search engines know which version is the ‘main one’ and the one that they should prioritise for a relevant search.
Heading Tags
If you’re publishing a large body of copy, for example a blog or an article, header tags break that copy up into sections which can be navigated and used to structure your page.
These make reading the page easier for users and help search engines ascertain what is contained within the content and why it is valuable.
Ready to make Meta Tags a part of your digital strategy? Get in touch with us for more support on the different types of tags and how they support the customer journey.
