Want top search engine rankings? Just add meta tags and your website will magically rise to the top, right? Wrong. Meta tags are one piece in a large algorithmic puzzle that major search engines look at when deciding which results are relevant to show users who have typed in a search query.
While there is still some debate about which meta tags remain useful and important to search engines, meta tags definitely aren't a magic solution to gaining rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or elsewhere – so let's kill that myth right at the outset. However, meta tags help tell search engines and users what your site is about, and when meta tags are implemented incorrectly, the negative impact can be substantial and heartbreaking.Let's look at what meta tags are, what meta tags matter, and how to avoid mistakes when implementing meta tags on your website.
What Are Meta Tags?
A special HTML tag that provides information about a Web page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page, how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building their indices.
Here's a code example of meta tags:
<head>
<title>Not a Meta Tag, but required anyway</title>
<meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
</head>
The Title Tag:-
Although the title tag appears in the head block of the page, it isn't actually a meta tag. What's the difference? The title tag is a required page “element” according to the W3C. Meta tags are optional page descriptors.
To learn more about best practices for title tag element, our post “How to Write Title Tags For Search Engine Optimization” tells you everything you need to know.
The Description Meta Tag:-
This is what the description tag looks like:
<meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here">
Ideally, your description should be no longer than 155 characters (including spaces). However, check the search engine results page (SERP) of choice to confirm this. Some are longer and some are shorter. This is only a rule of thumb, not a definite “best practice” anymore.
The “description” meta tag helps websites in three important ways:
- “Description” tells the search engine what your page or site is about.
- “Description” helps with click through rates to your site.
- “Description” helps with site rankings.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the “keywords” meta tag was a critical element for early search engines. Much like the dinosaurs, this tag is a fossil from ancient search engine times.
The only search engine that looks at the keywords anymore is Microsoft's Bing – and they use it to help detect spam. To avoid hurting your site, your best option is to never add this tag.
Or, if that's too radical for you to stomach, at least make sure you haven't stuffed 300 keywords in the hopes of higher search rankings. It won't work. Sorry.
If you already have keyword meta tags on your website, but they aren't spammy, there's no reason to spend the next week hurriedly taking them out. It's OK to leave them for now – just take them out as you're able, to reduce page weight and load times.
Other Meta Tags:-
There are many other meta tags, but none are really considered useful nowadays.
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