Meta Tags and Free Advertising You’re Missing on Your Pages
What are Meta Tags and Why Are They Important for SEO? š¤«
Meta tags are snippets of text that provide search engines with information about a website or page. They are an essential part of SEO as they help search engines understand the content of a webpage and determine how it should be indexed and ranked for search engine users to find you. Hereās an example of where youāve likely seen these meta tags being used to help you find things like digital marketing
Meta tags are used to create organic outreach opportunities by appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs) as well as SEM campaigns almost providing free advertising billboard space when someone is looking for a product or service online.
When optimizing meta tags, businesses can increase their visibility in SERPs and drive more organic traffic to their website as search engines use this information to categorize your page. For more information about how a search engine categorizes your content, check out our post about how youāre categorized.
How to Use Meta Tags & Search Engine Assets to Improve Your Organic Reach š
Meta tags are pieces of HTML code that are included in the header of an HTML webpage as a first line of categorizing and defining a web page. A search engine tends to crawl and index these pieces as the items to show in SERPs. Depending on your website builder, these items might be defined as follows:
- Manually updating the content for each of the pages
- The first lines of the pageās content
- Variables set by the builder to share the assets
Thereās a long list of meta tags that help your site, but itās usually an exercise in finding out how your audience speaks and the language someone looking for your page will use. To see the options available, we can use a real example such as Instagram.
Instagram has only a few meta tags that they use, but a long list of alternative links that they accommodate so that users who share these pages across different devices have a seamless experience in Meta applications such as Whatsapp or Facebook.
Important Meta Tags Necessary for Effective SEO
Given their utility, there are tons of tags for different purposes, but we will highlight here the most important meta tags for most use cases that encompass product or services websites. Hereās a list of the meta tags useful for getting you started:
- Title tag -
<title></title>- The first anchor your visitors will see from organic search results - Meta Description -
<meta name=ādescriptionā content=āā¦ā/>- A field used in the description of your page to reflect the contents when visitors find you via organic search or your link is shared - Heading tags -
<h#></h#>- Although it doesnāt directly affect search results, it helps search engines like google categorize your content quickly and find whether or not your sections directly answer common questions users have - Image Alt tags -
<img alt = āā¦ā/>- Search engines canāt see images and this tells them if your content is fitting - Schema Markup -
<html itemtype = ā[schema type]ā></html>- An extensive topic, but one worth reviewing to understand how schemas can further categorize your content and put them in the appropriate format for readers who search for specific service or product categories - Social Media Tags -
<meta name=āog:ā¦ā/>- The open graph protocols used for sharing social media elements of your page conveniently when your link is shared. There are several fields that are available and for more information you can visit https://ogp.me/ to understand how the arrays and the objects are defined.
Although itās a section of your website that your users canāt see, itās an important part of your anatomy like your organs and bones that are under flesh but, are necessary to walk or breathe. Take care of your websiteās anatomy with meta tags that are important to your audience so that they can find you in common search engines.
If youāre building a web application, reach out to EV Advisory us about what more your meta tags can help you with.