Meta tags provide your page in a brief way. A preview of a page’s content can be viewed by search engines as well as users. In essence, what is the purpose of your page? If you judge a book by its cover, then it’s a good book.
Meta means “metadata” and refers to data provided by these tags about your site’s content.
The meta tags of your page appear in the HTML code, not on the actual page. This is the preview text that users see on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Within the world of web optimization for search engines, meta tags are very relevant. These tags tell Google and other search engines what content is on a page. The idea is to summarize in a few characters the type of content being indexed. Labeling a website’s contents is very important since the search engines will have a clearer idea of the page’s structure.
An individual’s first impression of your page is influenced by your meta tags. You will get more visitors to your website if you have a good meta description. By using them, search engines will be able to determine what your content is about and display it appropriately. Imagine you’re browsing a store shelf and you see one product with a label that’s old and unattractive. What is the product made of? It leaves out important information. On another product, you see a label that’s fresh and engaging, with a list of visible ingredients. Your decision will be based on which product has the best label. A bad meta description will not lead to a click on your content, just like a bad meta tag.
The main types of labels
The labeling that you find on a website is very varied. You can divide it between structural tags and content tags. Both types of meta tags are of equal importance in terms of SEO, and one should not be preferred over the other, although content structure tags are possibly those that form the page’s skeleton.
Title
Every page within a website must contain a title that briefly summarizes what it is about. Including some of the most representative keywords of the linguistic corpus you have configured for the web that you wish to position is recommended. At the beginning of search engine optimization, there was talk that the extension of the title tag should be between 60 and 67 characters since Google did not show more in the search results.
Over the last few years, there has been a lot of debate about how long this tag and the meta description tag should be. The fact is that Google has become smarter and can adapt the extension of this tag as it pleases, according to various factors, such as what the user is looking for. The latest experiments in this field suggest that the most optimal extension if you do not want Google to alter the title section in the SERPS is one that occupies between 50 and 59 characters.
You will see how sometimes the title tag will be the most difficult to fill in since it is really difficult to summarize the content of a page in so little space.
Description
The description tag, also known as a meta description, should contain a summary of what is on the page. It is convenient to take advantage of this tag to introduce some keywords that naturally interest us for SEO. Its extension should be at most 160 characters, although, as with the title tag, there is a great debate about what it should occupy.
Meta keywords
In the origins of SEO, this meta tag introduces all the keywords for which you want to position a website. For some time now, search engines have yet to consider this label since it soon became an irrelevant field in which keyword stuffing was the order of the day. The evolution of search engine algorithms and semantic search left behind the need to fill this tag, which practically became a paragraph full of keywords separated by commas without much use.
H1, H2, H3
You are facing the most representative tags in structural tagging. Through these meta tags, you inform search engines of the structure of the texts on the page in question. The content hierarchy is distributed in a particular way, in which H1 marks the fundamental or primary part of the page, the first title to be highlighted within a text. H2 and H3 follow, with H2 being more relevant than H3, and so on. Although there is no limit to the number of “H tags” to use, it is not advisable to go beyond H4, as the content would be too dispersed and the structure would lose its meaning.
Images
For whatever reason, images are often the biggest thing forgotten regarding on-page SEO optimization. The fact is that search engines increasingly take multimedia content into account and reward its use when positioning a website.
Title
The <title> tag of the images is the same as that of the page itself; that is, it is about writing a title that indicates the content of the photograph in a concise way. Its extension should be at most 60 characters.
Alt
In the case of the <alt> meta tag of an image, it is a question of describing the photograph’s content in a similar way to how you do it in the <description> tag of a page. Logically, the alt tag should be larger than the title meta tag and be more descriptive.
It is worth noting that search engines today are blind when it comes to recognizing the visual content of images. This is why it is essential to complete both the title tag and the description, since only in this way will search engines know what the image in question contains. Thinking about the optimization of SEO on the page, you can take advantage of these tags to introduce keywords naturally.
Length
There is a great debate about the length each tag should occupy, the effect this has on search results, and the work behind the tagging of each piece of content. In any case, some tools facilitate the creation of labels since they count their extensions as you write them.
To learn meta tags, you can enroll in a digital marketing course in Chandigarh.
