Meta tags are one of the most important SEO strategies, that when used properly will result in good organic traffic.
Think of meta tags as small adverts for your web page.
How do we use them for advertising?
Use them to provide information to your customers by answering questions starting with
Why do we do that?
There is a lot of competition on the internet for buy terms such as
You will get little results by using these headlines.
A better way is to use your meta tags to provide information by answering questions for the user.
Title meta tag
<title>Title Meta Tag</title>
The title meta tag is very important, it is usually shown whenever that page appears in search engine results. It needs to be relevant to the content on your webpage.
The length of the title should be around 50 – 60 characters long. To find a good title I start to type the title into Google Search and see what the automatic predictions appear. I adjust the title to fit.
The title should have your catchphrase which includes at least 1 keyword, followed by your business name Eg: Meta Tags That Google Understands – Microbite
Sometimes Google will not use your title if it does not think it matches your content.
Description meta tag
<meta name=”description” content=”Description Meta Tag”>
I recommend that you use the description meta tag if you have a clear understanding of your webpage and want to summarise it in different words. Google may choose to use your description meta tag or will automatically generate one for you. Generally, it is 160 characters long.
Robots meta tag
<meta name='robots' content='noindex,follow' />
If you want Google to not index a page, set meta robots to “noindex,follow.” If you do this then you need to also be consistent in your robots.txt and not include it your sitemap.xml. There are some pages that you do not want to appear on the internet. Eg You haven’t finished publishing the webpage, or the webpage contains personal information that you do not what to appear on the internet via search results or information about Cheddy because you don’t want the internet know that this polar teddy bear exists.
Viewport meta tag
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
Without a viewport meta tag, mobile devices render pages at typical desktop screen widths. This meta tag solves the issue for responsive websites only as it uses the device’s screen width to fit the webpage content.
Charset meta tag
<meta charset="UTF-8">
Charset UTF-8 is a universal character set capable of displaying all languages, it is an important meta tag without it your webpage may have missing foreign language characters Eg: Бзиа will display as ????
A website built using WordPress will automatically include most of the meta tags with an option to include others.
Other meta tags are now redundant in 2019 and do not offer much help when it comes to Google Search Engine Optimisation.