While metadata or meta tags are not as important as they once were due to the large-scale abuse webmasters use to impose upon them to trick search engines and win unearned search, they are still important to utilize in your website. Meta tags should be used as a part of your search engine optimization strategy. Why? They still offer some control in how your web content is presented to search engines, but they also have the deadly ability to prevent your web pages from being found by search engines at all. It’s important as part of your web content strategy to include meta tag entry. How do you implement them into this strategy?
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There are three meta tags that are most common and popular among search engines: meta description tag, meta keyword tag and meta robots tag. Typically any other meta tags will be ignored by search engines except for special search engines.
The Meta Description Tag
This tag influences the content description to search engine crawlers that support this use. Most search engines only read the first 160 characters of this tag so it’s highly recommended do not abuse its use. For search engines that do support this meta tag it’s often used as the quick summary of the page when you’re going through the list of search results. Use keywords and important phrases in your description for best results, but assume it will also be a person seeing this so it makes some sense to them.
Code Example:
<head>
<title>Title of the web page</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”This is the description of the web page. Use keywords and place this within the head tag.”/>
</head>
The Meta Keyword Tag
This was the meta tag that was most abused by webmasters that caused many search engines to ditch the notion of using them, but there are still search engines that will utilize this meta tag so it is still recommended to use it. The use of this meta tag is reserved to further influence what content is found on the page by providing keywords in a comma separated list. Some search engines do use this so it’s important to be thorough in your web content.
Code Example:
<head>
<title>Title of web page</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”first keyword, second keyword, third keyword, fourth keywords, etc.”/>
</head>
The Meta Robots Tag
Most content management systems do not give the user the ability to edit this, and a substitute often used for this meta tag is the robots.txt file for efficiency. The meta tag tells search engines whether or not this file is to be followed or indexed. This is a less common used meta tag but can still be effective. The robots.txt file allows you to block search engines from crawling entire directories with one line which is why this tag is less used.
Code Example:
<head>
<title>Title of web page</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”/>
</head>
You can utilize all three meta tags within the head tag if you wish. The title tag could also be described as a meta tag, and it’s perhaps the most important tag of them all. This tag can hold a lot of weight in search engines. This is to ultimately describe what your page is about. Using keywords in your title tag can go a long way for you.
Before you start sending your content authors to work on updating the content in your website, consider holding training on how to update these tags using your content management system or by some other means. Explain what you’re looking for as a company to win search and your brand. This sort of effort may just generate traffic through search you may have missed out on if you didn’t take the time to understand them. The best part about them. You can edit these freely without editing your content and your readers won’t know the difference – just the robots finding your site.
