Meta tags and the main section of a website (2023)

This post was originally published on August 26, 2015 and was updated on August 1, 2019 and April 5, 2021.

A key component of any website - eachwell optimizedWebsite, that is, it is themeta tags. These are the parts of the web page that tell Google and other search engines what a website is called, what it is about, whether it can be indexed by search bots, what keywords it contains, what it should look like, and even where it is located. finds. .

Some meta tags aremore important than others, and if you're not careful, you can waste a lot of time and effort filling in tags that don't really do your site any good.

Related:A Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization for Small Business Websites

Meta tags quick guide

This article reflectsMajor changes to Google's search algorithms, it will say important things like:

• Where can you find meta tags?
• What do meta tags do?
• What meta tags do you need?
  • title tag
  • description meta tag
  • Label target robot
  • open chart marks
  • meta keyword tag
  • Other HTML Meta Tags
• Conclusion and next steps.

Let's start.

There are three basic parts of a website:

1. the head (or head)
2. the body
3. the footer

Think of your body as a website. Your head is clearly the header, the footer is your feet, and your torso is, well, you get the idea.

The header and footer of a website are almost the same on all pages.

Traditionally, you would place your company name and logo in the header, hours of operation, address, and phone number in the footer. The body of each page changes depending on what you type, but the header and footer are always the same.

Editor's note:Do you want to create an impressive logo for your business? enter ourfree logo makerTry it today.

check aboveSitio GoDaddy. At the top is the banner: GoDaddy, Help, How To, etc. This is the header. If you visit another page on the GoDaddy blog, this part will remain exactly the same.

Now scroll to the bottom of this page. Did you see that blue banner down there with all the text above and below it? This is the footer.

If you visit another GoDaddy blog page, this banner and its information will also remain exactly the same.

It's the main text, the part you're reading right now that changes with each new page you visit.

The purpose of the header and footer is to provide a template for each individual page on a website. That way you don't have to code a header and footer every time you create a new page.

And since the header and footer are permanent, it makes sense that you would put important code like meta tags in the header. YouI couldPut it in the footer, but that's a bad idea.

This is because search engine bots only crawl a limited part of a web page before exiting. The only way to ensure that bots see this important metacode is to put it at the top where Google expects it to be.

Think of a website as having a “monitoring budget.” Search engine robots crawl part of your website. If you have a lot of unnecessary code or put your important information in the footer, your crawl budget might not cover the important stuff because the bots had to deal with the unnecessary stuff.

(It's like having a salad when you go out for pizza. You really don't want to waste valuable space on the salad, do you? No, you want to save it all for pizza! That's how budget tracking works.)

Now that you know where meta tags are stored, what exactly do they do?

Related:10 Ways To Improve Google Keyword Rankings

go back up

What do meta tags do?

Meta tags are part of yourSearch Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEOThis is where you teach search engines what your website and all of its individual pages and digital assets (such as images, videos, and documents) are.

For example, Google, Bing, and Yahoo will know that this page is about website meta tags and SEO meta tags, in part because of the title and keywords.

The job of meta tags is to define the subject of an individual web page or the keyword to target the page.

Some meta tags are more important than others, but it's critical that they all match the page's target keyword.

For example, himdescription meta tagtells us what a specific page is about. It is a brief synopsis of the content of the site and what we can expect.

As recently as seven years ago, you could write a great description that would convince Google to rank your site above the competition. For example, you had to use your keywords at the beginning of the description (the first four words if you could, no matter how bad it sounded to human readers) and make sure your keyword appeared in the title, URL, and body. correctly. paint number

If all of these things match up, your web page could rank pretty high for that keyword.

Of course, we can never have good things on the internet, and people started making horrible websites that did what Google wanted but people hated. It got so bad that the internet was filled with all these horrible websites that fooled Google but were unreadable and useless to humans.

Therefore, Google has banned several common SEO tactics because these SEO spammers have ruined them for everyone.

Nowadays, the function of the meta description is to make people read your page.

When your site appears in a Google search result, people will read your meta description about your page. If you've written a good one, your page will be more likely to be read. If you wrote a bad one or none at all and let Google try to create one of its own, people are less likely to read your page.

This means that your meta description is still valuable, but only because it attracts people to visit your site, rather than tricking Google into thinking yours is the best.

Oother meta tags have other functions, which tells Google how to behave, what to display, and what your site is/does/has, but you only need a few of them.

go back up

Here are the main meta tags and a brief description of how they work. Some of these tags help your website visitors, others help Google and/or web browsers decide how to behave.

title tag

The title tag is part of the SEO trinity. This tag must fully match the URL and the content of the page, the other two legs of the stool. This is one of the strongest signals that lets search engines know that a page is about a specific topic, which directly affects your keyword rankings.

When search engine robots visit a website, they look at the titles of all the pages to see what each page is about.

The title is different from the title of a page. The headline is what people see when your page appears on a social network like Facebook. The title is what the search engine robots see. Just think of this simple mnemonic:

H stands for human-readable headlines, T stands for headlines read by, alas! It doesn't matter.

If you are curious about whether to choose one or the other, the answer is no, both are equally important. People won't click on a meaningless or boring title, bots won't understand clever titles that don't contain keywords. Go ahead and use the keyword on both.

Here are some basic best practices for creating an optimized title tag:

• Use a maximum of 65 characters (including spaces).
• The page's target keyword must appear first.
• Each page must have a title tag.
• Each title tag must be unique (never use the same title tag on other pages).
• The tag always appears at the end of the title tag. This increases your number of characters.
• Separate the title from the tag with a hyphen or | pipe (this is the symbol above the \ key).
• If there is space, be sure to include your company name or your own name in the title tag. If there is no space, leave it outside. People know where it is because you put the mark at the top of the page.

A user sees the title tag on the search engine results page (SERP). This content is not displayed to the user on the website itself. It is hidden so only bots can see it.

Pro Tip:If you use WordPress as your content management system, I highly recommend using WordPress.Yoast SEO Pluginalthough there are others. It helps you automatically create your title tags that you can customize yourself. It also gives you a place to write your description meta tag. Speaking of which, let's take a look at...

go back up

description meta tag

The meta description tag indirectly affects keyword rankings and has a big impact on SERP click-through rate, but not for the reasons you might think.

Seven or eight years ago, your meta description tag could trick Google into ranking you higher if you were smart, and crafty and crafty, like you wrote it.

But Google got smart and no longer takes meta descriptions into account when determining page rank. Wheredisapproving gesturecomes into play helps other people know what your site is about.

If you write a boring meta description or don't use the keywords in your description and someone sees it on a search engine results page, they'll be less inclined to click through to your page. And Google really takes click-through rates into account.

The more people click on your site in their SERPs, the better your site will perform. The less they click, the worse it works.

So if you have a bad meta description, your page will have a harder time grabbing people's attention. And if you don't type anything, Google will select its own text from your page, hoping it's a good enough description of the content. In fact, an article on the ahrefs blog said thisGoogle rewrites meta descriptions 62.78% of the time. You can imagine how cold and unartistic these investigative robots can be. Do you really want to trust them to make that decision?

Here are some basic rules to remember when writing a description meta tag:

• Never exceed 150 characters including spaces. If you use Yoast SEO to write your meta description, it will inform you if you have exceeded this limit.
• Place the target keyword of the page at the beginning of this tag.
• Every page should have a meta description tag.
• Each meta description tag must be unique (never use the same description on other pages).
• Use call-to-action language that entices the user to click on the search result.

Users see this snippet in the SERP, even if it's not visible on your site.

go back up

Label target robot

Use robot meta tags carefully! You really need to know how to properly implement this tag, and you should have a good understanding of the various directives in this tag. If not, leave him alone.

The meta robots tag tells search engine robots how to behave on your site: what areas to visit and register, what content to avoid or ignore, dress code, curfews, things like that.

But mostly it's the first two things: what to visit and record, what to avoid and ignore.

Some of the robot tag commands tell search engines to index and follow a page, and others tell search engines not to index and follow. As you may have guessed, these are the NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW tags.

Using one or both tags will not generate organic recommendations on search engines. These pages are completely ignored and not seen by search engine robots.

The three main robot tags are:

• <META NOMBRE="ROBOTS" CONTEÚDO="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
• <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW">
• <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NO INDEX, DO NOT FOLLOW">

The first line tells search engines not to include this page in their search index, but to follow all hyperlinks on that page. (That is, follow a hyperlink wherever it takes you, whether it's to another page on this site or to a page on another site entirely.)

The second line tells search engines to index the page, but not to follow links on the page that point to other pages. (In other words, ignore any hyperlinks on the site.)

The last line of directives tells search engines to ignore the page and all links on the page. This makes the page unusable for organic referral traffic. You can use this on a page or blog article that you need to keep on a website for historical purposes, but you don't want search engines to crawl or include it in search results.

I would use one of these lines on a given page, not all three at once.

go back up

open chart marks

Open Graphics Tags (OG Tags)are used to create custom notifications to share on some social media platforms.

basically if you wantshare informationfrom a specific web page on another social network like Facebook or Twitter, you need these tags.

You tell these networks what information you want to see when you share a link to your website.

For example, if you've ever pasted a link from a message into a status update on Facebook or Twitter and filled in the headline and a photo, that's a social graph. And it's the OG tags that told the network how to do this.

These are the typical OG tags used on a website:

• property meta="y:title"
• meta property="og:description"
• property meta="og:type"
• meta-property="e:url"
• property meta="og:image"
• property meta="og:site_name"

These tags do not directly affect the ranking. However, studies have shown that pages that rank better for competitive keywords tend to get more shares on Twitter, Facebook, and other networks. (If you're still not sure what you need, ask your web designer.)

go back up

meta keyword tag

What I can say? Keyword meta tags actually serve no constructive purpose for almost every search engine in the world, including Bing (US), Baidu (China), and Naver (South Korea). (There is a possibility thatYandex, the Russian search engine,I couldUse keyword tags, but they have very little weight). Most search engine pros are unaware of this as well.

Google doesn't give this tag any weight, but there may be a penalty for misuse.

In the past, people abused this special tag by stuffing it with keywords. You might see a few dozen different variations of a single keyword: tennis, women's tennis, men's tennis, kids' tennis, etc., etc., hoping someone somewhere is looking for that niche keyword.mismatch corrective orthopedic athletic shoes.

These dirty, lazy spammers have ruined everything for everyone, and as a result, no one can benefit from keyword meta tags now.

I can think of one reason to keep an eye on your keywords, and that is if you are using an SEO plugin like Yoast that I mentioned above. Yoast needs to know your top keywords to determine if you meet the ranking criteria.

Another reason to keep track of your keywords is to make sure you're not blogging about the same thing over and over again. Yoast will actually tell you if you've written about that keyword many times before, which is another SEO spam tactic.

Related:How to use Bing Webmaster Tools to improve the SEO of your website

go back up

Other HTML Meta Tags

HayDozens of other meta tagswhich can be used in the header of a website. There are tags for the topic of the page, the geographic location of the page/your company, the owner, their email address, the date, etc.

However, you should avoid them completely.

Every line of code affects page load speed and you want your web pages to load as fast as possible.

A faster loading page is very important to improve your SEO.

Since these other tags don't help with search engine optimization and can negatively affect your page load speed, it's best not to use them.

Also, remember what I said earlier about your tracking budget? You may be wasting your tracking budget on unnecessary meta tags. So the fewer meta tags you have in the header, the better for your crawl budget.

However, there is one exception: the viewport tag. OKMoz:

“In this mobile world, you have to specify the viewport. Otherwise, you risk a poor mobile experience.”

In recent years, Google has devoted significantly more time, energy, and resources to helping users have a positive mobile experience. So much so that even if you have a great desktop version of your website, if you have a bad mobile version, your desktop version will fall behind in the rankings. So don't ignore your mobile experience.

OFerramenta Google PageSpeed ​​Insightswill give you more information about the viewport label. The default tag is: <meta name=viewport content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>

If you aremake your own seoand you trust Yoast SEO to write your description and title tag, that's fine. But if you have no idea what you're doing, leave that tag to your designer or developer. Let them tell you what to do with it, or better yet, let them do it themselves.

go back up

Conclusion and next steps

Meta tags are an important part of any website, but they don't have the impact they did a few years ago. But that doesn't mean you should ignore them. When used correctly, your SEO meta tags can still have an impact.the search ranking of your siteand online performance.

Do you want to learn more about SEO and how to use the different meta tags? Or would you like to leave SEO and meta tags to the experts?

If it's the latter, consult the professionals below.GoDaddy SEO Servicesto give your site the attention it deserves. Learn to work less and rank higher. If it's the first, I recommend it.Read everything you can find on the Moz.com blog. They are at the forefront of search engine optimization and up to date with the latest Google practices and updates. If you are a WordPress user, also get the Yoast plugin andread her blog; They also stay up to date with the latest SEO research and can help you get the most out of the Yoast blog.

This article incorporates content originally posted by on the GoDaddy blog.Garth O'Brien.