Understanding Meta tags: Definition, meta tag analysis of a webpage of choice and description of each meta tag

Definition of Meta tags?

Meta tags are small snippets of text on your website, describing the page content and how the basic page the information would be presented in SERP. (Scrcevic, 1633)

Meta Tag Analysis of DMU

In this analysis, the title tag "Uber: Sign Up to Ride or Drive on the App" is a clear and concise description of what the webpage is about. 

The meta description "Get a ride in minutes. Or become a driver and earn money on your schedule. Uber is finding you better ways to move, work, and succeed" is a compelling summary of the benefits of using the Uber app. 

The meta robots tag "index, follow" tells search engines to index the webpage and to follow the links on it.

Description of each meta tag:

Title Tag

The title tag is a small, one-line snippet on your page code, invisible to users and visitors, but a very important factor for Search Engines and your position on them. The Title tag is one of the most important tags for your page SEO, because of:

1. If your title tag is empty, the page would likely not be indexed by search engines, as they have nothing to show in their SERP, or Google would replace the page title with random text from the page they think that may fit there, which is not always what you want to show in SERP,

2. If your Title tag is too short, you are missing the opportunity to add some of your essential keywords to it. In this case, Google can also replace your title tag with something that their robot thinks may be a better fit for your page.

3. If your title tag is too long, the Search Engines may read it not user friendly and demote your web page in SERP,

4.  If your Title tag is not properly written, it would not attract the attention of searchers and you are losing the unique chance to drive traffic to your website, leaving the whole of your “cake” to your competitors.

This means you should include the Title tag onto your page, write it a proper length and attractive enough to attract people to click on your link, instead of the links of some of your competitors who may be on TOP, or below you in SERP.

Bad example of the page title tag is: <title>Home</title>, or <title>My Page</title>

A good example of a title tag: <title>TOP four reasons to write a proper page Meta tags</>

You should consider adding one or two essential keywords from your page to the title tag, for the best experience in the SERP.

Meta Description

The Meta description tag is a small, one-line snippet on your page code, invisible to users and visitors, but a very important factor for Search Engines and your position on them. The Meta Description tag is one of the most important tags for your page SEO, because of:

1.      If your Meta description is empty, the page would likely not be indexed by search engines, as they have nothing to show in their SERP. In some cases, Search Engines can decide to put some random content there, which would not be always the best one and that which you want to shoot to the visitors,

2.      If your Meta description is too short, you are missing the opportunity to add some of your essential keywords into it and to properly describe what the page is,

3.      If your Meta Description is too long, the Search Engines may read it not user friendly and demote your web page in SERP,

4.      If your Meta description is not properly written, it would not attract the attention of searchers, and you are losing the unique chance to drive traffic to your website, leaving the whole of your “cake” to your competitors.

This means you should include the Meta description onto your page, write it a proper length and attractive enough to attract people to click on your link, instead of the links of some of your competitors who may be on TOP, or below you in SERP.

Bad example of the page title tag is: <meta name="description" content=" ">

A good example of a title tag: <meta name="description" content=" Find out what to do in case of earthquake danger to keep yourself and the people around you safe and learn how to prepare for possible threats.">

You should consider adding one or two essential keywords from your page to the title tag, for the best experience in the SERP.

 

Meta Robots

Another important Meta tag on your website is the Meta robot's tag.

It is used to instruct the Search Engine bots on what to do on your website, and every single page, and how to behave when it comes to your web page.

You should be careful with this tag because it can have both positive and negative influences on your page in SERP, so you should understand well when and where to use each of the commands, for the best result.

The Meta Robots tag should look like: <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"/>

So, what do these different commands mean, how to use them and where?

index – this tag instructs the bot to index your page once when he visited it, and this is the most common behavior on the web page.

no index – in some cases we don’t want the robot to index specific pages, in the case of the listing pages and dynamic pages with a lot of records that don’t have real value for the SEO. Disallowing the indexation of the group of pages, or specific pages may save you a huge crawl budget and speed up the indexation of the most important pages on your website, which may remain invisible if robots have to spend expensive crawling time and budget on non-important pages. On the other side, in some cases, Google can decide that the disallowed page is of worth for the visitors, and can index it and rank despite your instruction, so be sure to physically remove unneeded pages or make them uninteresting for search engines in other ways,

follow- this tag instructs the robots to follow the links on your page, and this is the most common behavior on many websites.

no follow – is the tag instructing the bot to stay on this page, not following links.

no archive – this command would prevent the Search Engine from showing the cached version of the page and would load only the latest version, which may slow down the process and produce the additional load onto your server. On the other side, if the content of your page is not changing too often, as in the case of the static pages, you may want to use the archive tag to instruct the search engine to show the SERP snippet from its cache.

More Meta tags may be used on your page, but here we are concentrating only on the most important at this moment, and the most used ones.

 

Meta Keywords

The last Meta tag I would say few words about is Meta Keywords, which is not anymore used in many websites, after the announcement of Google that they don’t consider the keywords that important, but the fact is that people are searching the Search Engines exactly by keywords, and they were, are, and would be a crucial part of your website.

While Google can understand the global idea of your website and every single page from your content, they are still using the keywords and would continue using it. Also, not less important, all other Search Engines are using the keywords, and in some areas, they cover 30% of the market or more. I am personally not risking losing that big piece of the market because of laziness to include the few keywords on the website and optimize the website for them. It is paying back very well, not only in other search engines but also in Google.

Setting up the one or two essential keywords into the Meta keywords tag would take you just one minute, but may mean a big difference in SERP, whatever the part of the SEO community, usually only the Google followers trying to tell you. My almost 20 years of experience is showing different results.

Chose few essential keywords and put them into the tag. They can’t hurt you but can help you.

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2">

Reference(s)

Srncevic, I. (1633) What are meta tags?, LinkedIn. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-meta-tags-ivica-srncevic/ (Accessed: March 5, 2023).