Meta tags are essential elements of HTML code and a cornerstone of effective SEO strategies. They’ve been around for decades, serving as a crucial bridge between your content, search engines, and users. By ensuring your content is easily discoverable, meta tags play a vital role in your SEO strategy. Without them, your content could get lost in the vast online landscape, never reaching its intended audience.
However, with the ever-expanding internet and the growing complexity of web-building tools, it’s easy to lose track of which elements are truly essential. Many web designers approach coding without a clear strategy, leading to wasted effort on components that add little value to your page’s SEO.
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are HTML elements that provide search engines with information about a page’s content. Although they are not visible on the page itself, they are embedded in the <head> section of your HTML code. Below, we explore the five most commonly used meta tags on modern websites.
1. Title Tag
The title tag is displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result. Each page on your site should have a unique title that accurately reflects the page’s content and entices users to click. Google typically shows the first 50-60 characters of a title, so make sure the most important keywords are included at the beginning.
Example of a Title Tag:
<title>This is a Bold Title</title>
2. Description Tag
The description tag often appears below the title on SERPs, providing a brief summary of the page’s content. Each page on your site should have a 150-160 character description that is both unique and accurate. Ensure your description closely matches the page’s content, as mismatched descriptions may not be displayed by search engines.
Example of a Description Tag:
<meta name="description" content="This is a meta description sample.">
3. Alt Text Tag
Alt text tags are crucial for images on your page, as search engines cannot read images directly. Alt text provides a description of the image, helping search engines understand its content. When creating alt text, be concise and informative, focusing on what the image depicts without using unnecessary adjectives. Aim for alt text to be under 16 words, or 50-55 characters.
Example of an Alt Text Tag:
<img src="http://example.com/image-abc.jpg" alt="abc">
4. Robot Meta Tag
The robot meta tag provides instructions to web crawlers (bots) that index your website for search engines. This tag contains directives like FOLLOW, which tells crawlers to follow all links on the page, and INDEX, which instructs them to index the page.
Example of a Robot Meta Tag:
<head>
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex, nofollow”>
<meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow”>
</head>
5. Canonical Tag
A canonical tag is used to indicate the preferred version of a webpage when there are multiple versions available. By including a canonical tag, you tell search engines which URL is the primary page, helping to prevent duplicate content issues.
Example of a Canonical Tag:
<head>
<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://example.com/duplicate-page/”>
</head>
Conclusion:
Meta tags are fundamental to any webpage’s SEO strategy. They form the backbone of HTML and provide essential information to search engines about the content of your site. Implementing meta tags is straightforward and doesn’t require extensive programming knowledge—just some basic HTML skills. If you need assistance with optimizing meta tags for your website, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m here to help you ensure your content is easily discoverable and well-optimized for search engines.
Ethan is a Full Stack Web Developer and SEO Specialist based in Pittsburgh, PA. In his free time, Ethan enjoys working on various projects involving Ruby, Vue and AWS applications.
Ethan graduated from The Firehose Project coding bootcamp in 2016 with a focus on Ruby on Rail and Computer Software engineering.