Types of Meta Tags in SEO

The focus on seo meta tags changed during the years, as Search engines evolved.There are four major types of meta tags worth knowing about and we’ll talk about them all here.

Some are not as useful as they once were. Others are worth using regularly, and will very likely increase your traffic by letting Google know who you are and what you provide.

Check Out :: What are Meta Tags and Why are they important in SEO?

The four types of meta tags we’ll discuss here are:

• Meta Title Tag 

• Meta Description Tag

• Meta Keywords Tag

• Meta Robots Tag

1. Meta Title Tag

• Technically, the title tag isn’t a meta tag but it’s often put into the same basket. I’ve included it in this list because it’s very important for search engine optimization.

• The title tag is used to identify the page among others pages and to tell shortly what the page is about, it’s like title of a book chapter.

• The title tag is required in all HTML documents and it defines the title of the document. The markup looks like this:

• Syntax: <title>Title Here</title>

• The title shows up in two different places; in the top of a web browser and in the search engine result pages. This means that the title tag has a heavy influence on the CTR and your ranking.

• A good title should include keywords and it’s best to use these keywords in the beginning of the title. Remember that if these keywords match a user’s search query, they will be displayed in bold.

• Another thing that you should keep in mind is the length. Google will limit titles to 60 characters only.

Must Read : – Top 10 Best Tips for Title Tag Optimization

2. Meta Description Tag 

• This is a quite useful meta tag as, very simply, it explains to search engines and (sometimes) searchers themselves what your page is about.

• Google displays your Meta description in search results if your website’s particular web page is optimized for particular keywords, by matching search string from keywords used in meta description.

• Try to create description containing maximum 155-160 characters. Including all keywords in description is good practice that helps to increase rankings of keywords.

• Good description help search engines to understand what your page is about.Google can replace the description with its own version for the page if he thinks it’s not accurate or correct.

• This tag used to have a lot more ranking power, but algorithm updates have diminished its effect. It won’t improve your ranking, however, the meta description tag can still be useful because it is used on search engine result pages.

• But what happens if you have an empty description or if you haven’t used the meta description tag? Search engines will still display a short text in the SERPs, but they create one themselves.

• Syntax: – <meta name=”description” content=”page description”>

Related Post : : 12 Do’s and Don’ts in writing Meta Description in SEO

3. Meta Keywords Tag

• The meta keywords tag is where you put all of the keywords you use in your site.This is basically where you want the words which will take you to the top of the SERPs page to be.

• Meta Keywords are an example of a meta tag that doesn’t make much sense to use these days. Years ago, the meta keyword tags may have been beneficial, but not anymore.

• These days Google doesn’t use meta keywords in its ranking algorithm at all, because they’re too easy to abuse.

• In the meta keywords tag you can store a couple of keywords about the content of the page. However, it won’t improve your ranking. If you want to implement it, use the following format:

• Syntax: – <meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, Hacker, Google, Search, etc”/>

Related Post : : Top 10 Places to Use Keywords on your website in SEO

 4. Meta Robots Tag

The meta robots tag is used to manage the accessibility of a single web page for search engines. You can allow or disallow search engines to index the page, follow its links or archive it.

With this attribute, you’re telling the search engines what to do with your pages

• Index:-  Allow search engines robots to index the page (it’s the default).

• noindex:- Disallow search engines from showing the page in their results.

• follow:- Tells the search engines robots to follow the links on the page to index them.

• nofollow:- Tells the search engines robots to not follow any links on the page.

The important meta tag that you may need sometime is the Robots Meta tag which looks like this

• <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex,nofollow”>

• Using the above metatag, you can tell a spider or a robot that you do not want some of your pages indexed, or that you do not want your links followed.

• This meta tags tells search engines not to index the page and prevent them from following the links. If you happen to be using two contradictory terms (e.g. noindex and index), Google will choose the most restrictive option.

• Why is this tag useful for SEO? First of all it’s a simple way to prevent the indexation of duplicate content. It might also be useful for incomplete pages or pages with confidential information.

Related Post : : 16 Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Header Tags for SEO

Conclusion

• In simple terms, there are four types of meta tags you should concern yourself with: the meta title tag ,the meta description tag, the meta Keywords tag and the meta robots tag

• One of the most important parts is the title tag. Keep it under 70 characters and leverage keywords within it.The description tag is used to show more information about the content of the web page.

• Finally, The robots tag can be used to prevent duplicate content, confidential pages or unfinished parts  from being indexed.

• In the past, the keywords meta tag was very powerful but those days are gone. It’s best to leave it alone. Other less important meta tags are the language tag, content tag, refresh tag and non translate tag.

• Even if meta tags do not hold much water when it comes to page ranking, their importance is still present as the search engine robots validate their relativity to your content and site niche.

Also Read :: Do’s and Don’ts for Title Tags Optimization in SEO