Meta Tags for SEO - 6 Game Changing Meta Tags for SEO

The word “Meta Tags” comprises of two words “Meta” and “Tags”. Meta, which as per Google, means “referring to itself or the convention of its genre” and tags which means a label attached to something for the purpose of identification.

Both of these terms reflect the entire idea behind using meta tags while publishing a website or any webpage for the website. These meta tags help search engines aggregate relevant information from a webpage. This allows them to show the webpage as a relevant search result foron a relevant keywordranking. 

This process of providing meta tags for establishing the metadata for the website comes under the domain of SEO (search engine optimization). If you are aware of the different strategies of digital marketing, SEO makes for a huge part in driving organic traffic. Also as per Moz, meta tags are the second most important aspect of driving organic traffic (while content being the first).

Therefore, we are here to help marketers who want to stay relevant in 2023 and drive organic traffic. To establish this, we’ll be mentioning the best meta tags for SEO to win the online SERP (Search engine result pages) battle in 2023. Although before that, we will be dissecting different aspects that are related to the topic and useful for a better understanding.

Therefore, let’s start…

Why are Meta Tags important? - From an SEO Perspective!

SEO is primarily about increasing the crawlability of the website and improving the ranking of the content posted on it. This is the reason top SEO agencies make it a thumb rule to use them. The more crawlable the content is, the more data will a search engine gather from your website. As a result, this would enable the search engine to showcase your website and content in front of your target audience.

How does search engine crawler work? - For Meta Tags

Web crawlers are programs that go through different types of content on different websites. Once a crawler discovers content on a webpage or website, it goes through the data provided. This data is then categorized sosuch that whenever a user makes a search query, the search engine is capable of responding to it.

Crawlers first pick up the data from the meta tags. This is the reason, it is important to provide as many meta tags as possible so that the crawler can aggregate appropriate data to better classify your website content.

Below are the steps for website crawling:

• Crawlers start from the seed URL (specific domains and web pages marked by search engine for initial HTTP request) to reach other domains that are relevant.
• It then sends an HTTP request to the host page.
• Once the request is sent, a response is received along with the content of the page and other domains.
• It then parses relevant data from the page (along with links to other websites).
• After that, it creates a crawl queue (list of other relevant URLs to crawl).
• Later on, the steps from 2 to 4 are repeated.

Some of the algorithms that are utilized by a web crawler are listed below:

• Breadth-first search
• Depth-first search
• Randomized data

Important HTML Meta Tags for SEO - That are almost mandatory to use!

Here, we have aggregated the list of all the important meta tags for SEO. These meta titles are almost mandatory to use in order to establish a basic level of crawlability for your website. 

1. Meta Title

A Meta title is a title provided to a website or webpage that is shown in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) result. This happens upon requesting a search query on the search engine. This title is provided at the head section of the HTML script backing the website or the webpage.

This is how the Meta Title tag looks in an HTML script:

 

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Here are some best practices to follow while using a meta title tag:

• Meta titles should range between 30 to 60 characters.
• It should be as descriptive as possible.
• It should speak about the topic and the exact idea behind it.
• It should speak to the target audience.
• It should have the focus keyword.

2. Meta Description

The meta description tag is used in the head section of the website or webpage. A meta description is a short summary of a webpage or website. Its work is to explain to the user about the content of the webpage. This is the reason the majority of SEOs and content writers use it.

This is how the HTML script of meta description looks like:

 

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Note: It is important to provide a meta description. However, the SERP doesn’t always pick the meta description provided to show in the SERP result. Instead, sometimes it can randomly pick a blurb from the webpage or website to show it to the users.

Best Practices for Meta Descriptions

Here are some of the best practices that can be used while using the meta descriptions tag:

• Length of the meta description shouldn’t cross 160 chars to be shown completely on the SERP result.
• Use the focus keyword on the meta description.
• Include a CTA with the meta description
• Use active voice to make it actionable
• Try to keep it hyper focused to the topic provided
• Try to make it unique for the users

3. Robot Meta Tags

A robot tag is a useful meta tag. Using the robot meta tag, we can establish parameters for the crawler to crawl the website. For instance in a robot tag, we can use parameters like “nofollow” or “noindex”. This will give a directive to the crawler that the links from this page are “nofollow” and won’t share their link equity. Also, this page is not indexable.

Below is the format of using Robot tag in the HTML script:

Below are the different parameters of a robot meta tag:

 

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• Noindex: Provides the information that the webpage or website is non-indexable.
• Index: Gives information that the page is indexable.
• Nofollow: It tells the crawler not to pass on any follow link equity to the link available on the webpage or website.
• Follow: This allows the crawler to follow all the links available on the web page and pass on the link juice.
• Nosnippet: It enables the setting of not showing any snippet on the SERP result.
• None: Using this tag is equal to using nofollow and noindex together.
• Nocache: This is used to avoid any caching via internet browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.
• Noarchive: This would make the page non-cacheable for the SERP results.
• Unavailable_after: This tag can be used to avoid indexing after a particular date.

Best Practices for Robot Meta Tag

• Try not to use robot tags and x-robots on the same page because it makes one of the tags redundant.
• It is not necessary to use an index parameter on every page of the website to make it indexable.
• To make a page indexable but still pass on link equity, use the parameters “noindex, follow”.
• Try to use as many parameters for the robot tags as possible to make the directives clear for the crawler.
• Use the X-robot tags for indexing non-HTML components such as text, images, videos, etc.

4. NoFollow Tag

This tag can be used within the robot meta tag. However, the majority of SEOs use it within the body of the webpage or the website. This allows them to pass on link equity via particular links while abstaining it from the others.

For example:

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Here, there are two links. One with no “rel” tag and the other one with a “rel=”nofollow”. Inherently even though there is a “rel=dofollow” link on a webpage, it is still equivalent to a standard link that passes on link equity. However, the other one with “rel=”nofollow” explicitly mentions that the link equity isn’t transferrable and there is no shared equity between the two web pages.

It is important to control this tag because it directly affects the domain authority of a website. Domain authority directly impacts the importance of a webpage and makes it more or less likable to get crawled and ranked higher in the SERP result.  To further simplify this, one can say websites with higher website authority have their pages crawled first and have the chances of ranking higher on the SERP result.

Best Practices for NoFollow Link

These are the practices via which you can maximize the effect of nofollow:

• Use lowercase for nofollow because it enhances script readability.
• Avoid using multiple values in your meta tag.
• Try not to use conflicting tags on the webpage such as “” and “” in the same space. It leads to “nofollow” becoming the default attribute.

Game-Changing HTML Meta Tags for SEO

There are several types of meta tags that are used stringently. However, there are some types of meta tags that are used with limited knowledge or not used. Below, we have covered those articles that can absolutely help you transform your webpage. Therefore, let’s have a look at them.

1. Heading Tags (H1-H6)

Heading tags are used for describing the title of the topic and subsections within the webpage. It is important to use these tags as it increases the relevance of the title of the topic and the subsection. 

Here, H1 is the most important tag as it is used for the title. However, tags from H2 to H6, decrease in relevance consecutively from H2 to H6. Yet, it is important to use them effectively as they are crawled before the plain text and other attributes used on the webpage or the website.

2. Canonical Meta Tag

This meta tag is used when there is multiple duplicate content of the same page. By using the canonical tags for SEO, we can establish any webpage as the master copy of all the duplicate content published on the website. It is important because Google and similar search engines penalize duplicate content. 

Format of Canonical Meta Tag:

 

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Best Practices for using Canonical Meta Tag

Here are some of the best practices to use canonical meta tag effectively:

• Use canonical tags that are self-referential on the master copy itself.
• Use canonical tag with the homepage.
• Be careful while implementing canonical meta tags with redirected copies and multiple canonicalized copies. It is important ,otherwise,  it can give mixed signals to the crawler. 
• Use “HTTP or HTTPs” with the link that will be canonicalized.
• Use canonical tag with similar content pages of different languages.

3. Alt Meta Tag

Alt tags are also known by the name “alt descriptions” and “alt attributes” have an important function. The search engine itself isn’t smart enough to understand the content of the image published. Alt tags work to define the content of the image published on the website. Therefore using an alt tag to describe an image is a good practice for an SEO.

With alt tags, we can provide sufficient meta data to signal the crawler about the content of the image. Also, it helps in listing the image while making Google image search for a particular search query.

Format of Alt Meta Tag:

https://example.com/apple.jpeg” alt=”apple”/>

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Best Practices of Alt Meta Tag

These are best practices for using Alt meta tag:

• The filename used for the image should be self-explanatory.
• Create a sitemap for the image.
• The alternate tag should be short and crisp
• The length of the alt shouldn’t cross the barrier of 50-55 characters

4. Open Graph Meta Tag

Open Graph meta tags or OG meta tags are used for sharing social content to make it more enticing for the readers. These are used to control the URLs and how they are displayed on social media platforms.

These open graph meta tags were primarily a part of Facebook, however, they are even used by other platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Format of Open Graph Meta Tag:

There are several attributes of the Open Graph meta tag such as:

• Title
• URL
• Image
• Type
• Description
• Locale

Best Practices for Using Open Graph Meta Tag

• Try to use canonical tag with the og:url property
• Try to keep the OG titles up to 60 chars for desktop and 40 chars for mobile
• Use custom OG images for shareable content, logos, etc.
• Use optimum image size for sustaining clarity

5. Twitter Meta Tags

In the realm of social media, there are primarily meta tags for Facebook and Twitter. While the content of Facebook and the way it is displayed can be optimized via OG meta tags. For twitter, there are dedicated tags that can be used. These control the different attributes of the way the data is displayed on twitter.

Examples of Twitter Meta Tags:

• meta name= “twitter:title”
• Meta name= “twitter:card”
• Meta name= “twitter:description”
• Meta name= “twitter:site”
• Meta name= “twitter:image”

Format of using Twitter meta tags:

 

 

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Best Practice for Using Twitter Meta Tag

Here are some of the best practices for using Twitter meta tag:

• Try to use the correct twitter:card of the four available cards that are summary, summary_large, app, and player.
• Try to provide accurate content that represents the twitter:title and twitter:description tag.
• Use high quality images for twitter:image tag.
• Try to have the correct resolution of image for different card types.
• Test your twitter cards before publishing them.

6. Viewport Meta Tags

Viewport is the area of the screen on the computer over which the web content is displayed. This area can be controlled using the viewport meta tag. This meta tag is also useful in case of mobile devices where the original resolution of the web page is much wider. Viewport meta tag shrinks it down for mobile devices to provide the user a good viewing experience.

Format of using Viewport Meta Tag:

Different parameters of viewport meta tag are:

• Width
• Height
• initial-scale
• Minimum-scale
• Maximum-scale
• User-scalable
• Interactive-widget

Best Practices for Using Viewport Meta Tag

These are the best practices for effectively using viewport meta tag:

• Make sure to use the tag to ensure that it is displayed perfectly in all devices.
• Use the width parameter to ensure pages are displayed with the correct size.
• Avoid the use of user-scalable attributes as it blocks the capability to zoom in or out the page.
• Test your page on different devices to check viewport settings are working properly.

Wrapping Up!

There isn’t an iota of doubt regarding the importance of using meta tags for SEO purposes. In fact, there are multiple top digital marketing companies that often stress over the importance of meta tags. See crawlers are machines that hover around the internet to find and crawl as much content as possible. Adding to it, the amount of content generated and published on the internet is crossing barriers.

Therefore, it is important for a website to provide as much metadata to make this work easier. Using meta tags effectively will make the web crawlers an ally. This would enable the search engines to understand your offering in terms of better content, and help you gain more organic traffic. Organic traffic which is often the sole reason behind implementing SEO.