What are Meta Tags? The Importance of Using Meta Tags for SEO

What are Meta Tags? 

As search engines become more concerned about the relevance of content and the relationship between searches and the content that is ranked highly, they have come up with ways that pages can be optimised and understood. Meta tags are used to help search engines better understand what the content on a specific page is about, ensuring that it ranks for search queries whereby the information will be useful to those who are searching. These kinds of tags are not like most, and they are only visible within your HTML and can only be read by search engines who are indexing your webpage. Meta Tags are not long, and they contain a short description of information about the content on your webpage, ensuring that search engines have all of the data that they need to rank your webpage. Without these tags, search engines may not fully comprehend the information and may rank the page for incorrect or irrelevant searches, meaningless organic traffic being directed to your webpage. The following blog post will delve into looking at why meta tags are important and how you can effectively create your own and add them to your website! 

What is The Importance of Using Meta Tags for SEO?

Now that we have answered the question “What are meta tags?”, it is important to comprehend why they are so important and how they can affect the overall health and SEO of your webpage. As search engine crawlers make their way through your webpage and look for relevant information, like keywords, they may need a bit of extra help in understanding what the content is about and what type of user would benefit from this kind of information. Meta Tags are designed to hold this information, ensuring that search engines have all the correct data and can easily determine what a web page is about and even the context of it! The reason why this is so important for your SEO is that this helps web pages better understand your content which will ultimately help crawlers better index your web page for relevant searches. The more relevant searches that your page is indexed and ranked for, the more organic traffic is streamed to your webpage! 

When thinking about how to use meta tags for SEO, it is important to understand that these kinds of tags help provide search engines with the information that they will use to rank your web page. When given correct information through meta tags, search engines are able to ensure that the page will be displayed on searches that are relevant to the content and context of the tag. It is for this reason that meta tags are so important when it comes to SEO! 

What Does Meta Tags Do?

When looking at how search engines use meta tags, you are able to see just how important they are to the functioning and SEO of your webpage. There are a number of different types of tags, each distinguished by the type of information that they provide to search engines. These tags are each used to help search engines better interact with and understand the content and data you have on your webpage. The reason for the different types of tags is that each different element on a webpage may need to be explained a bit differently, from images to titles! How search engines use meta tags differentiates between the different types of tags available, ensuring that you provide enough information for your page to be ranked highly. Using just one meta tag to outline the general idea of the webpage may be too simple. with not enough information provided to correctly index and learn about the data provided. Each meta tag is designed to provide search engine crawlers with pertinent information about different elements that appear on your webpage, and using them correctly is imperative to the success of a page, particularly when it comes to SEO! 

What Meta Tags are Used to Improve Your WebSite’s Optimization?

The purpose of meta tags differentiates with each kind of tag available due to the fact that there are a number of different features on a webpage that may need to provide context and background to search engine crawlers. Meta tags are divided into different categories and there are a number of different types of tags that can be used to optimise a web page. The following are a few of the most widely used and essential meta tags. 

Title Tags

Titles are extremely important as they can give search engines an idea of what your content will be discussing.  meta title tags provide this information to search engines, helping them to understand the titles of pages. This information also helps search engines to present this title on search engine results pages, ensuring that the webpage is correctly titled to provide the most useful information to users. 

Image Tags

Image tags are another type of meta tag that is used on web pages. These tags describe images to search engines, providing them with information about what the image is and why it is relevant to the content. 

Description Meta Tags

When we visit a search engine and type a statement or question into the search bar, we are presented with a bunch of information all taken from different websites and webpages. The information from these descriptions is taken from the meta description tag, which is written by website owners, ensuring that the information provided is relevant to the content that will be presented on a webpage! 

Nofollow Meta Tags

Very often, website developers will have more than one of the same page and this may lead to content being duplicated over various pages. To ensure that this duplicated content does not interfere with your SEO or page rankings, nofollow meta tags have been developed so that you can let search engines know which page needs to be indexed and which one needs to be ignored. 

Keyword Meta Tags

Keyword meta tags refer to the tags that label what your pages’ most relevant keywords are. These kinds of tags help search engine crawlers to determine the main topics of your content and what you discuss on certain pages. This also helps search engines to better understand the context of the data, structuring what you consider to be most important and relevant on your webpage. 

Viewport Tags

With so many different devices and ways of getting on to search engines, having a tag that is able to change the view that people see and the scale of content and images can help improve your SEO. In today’s advanced technological world, having a tag that can equip your website with the information it needs to scale down on certain devices can greatly improve the experience that your users have with your website, improving your chances of ranking highly on search engine results pages! 

How Do You Add Meta Tags To Your Website?

Meta tags are invisible on your webpage and they are added to the HTML of your website, ensuring that they do not disrupt the flow and the ability of the user to read and comprehend your content in a structured way. Some platforms add in meta tags as a default setting, allowing for you to fill in the content without having to write the different codes and tags yourself. If you do have to manually add in each of the different tags, be sure to do so carefully as each tag needs to be done perfectly to be effective! If you are looking at how to write meta tags for seo specifically, we here at Markethinkers have a team of experts who know all the dos and don’ts of this SEO feature and can help you to write and structure the tags you are going to use. 

What are The Advantages of Using Meta Tags?

Meta tags allow for websites and search engines to interact and communicate with one another easily, ensuring that a search engine is aware of what your content is about. One of the main advantages of using meta tags is that they can greatly improve your chance of ranking highly and help to improve your SEO. When it comes to organic traffic, having a well-written blurb on search engine results pages is incredibly important as this would be the first interaction that a user has with your content and it will help them to decide whether or not the information and data you provide would be helpful. Using meta tags and other SEO tools can greatly improve the quality of traffic and increase the number of sales and visitors you receive! 

What Are The Tools That Can Help Check Meta Tags? 

SEO tools are often the best ways to keep track of the SEO elements that need to be distributed across your website, and lucky for you, there are tons available to help with anything you may need! When it comes to meta tags, having a tool to help you come up with and implement the different tags you will need can help you to better optimise your webpage, ensuring that you get the best possible results and stream of organic traffic! The following are just a few of the most effective meta tag tools to help optimise this element of your SEO. 

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress

When it comes to SEO meta tags and adding them to WordPress to better optimise your webpage, Yoast has one of the most responsive and easy to use plugins around! Plugins make it easy to monitor and adjust different elements on your webpage, with technical aspects controlled and sorted out for you. This ensures that you can focus on the content as opposed to worrying about the HTML elements that you may not know much about. Yoast is an easy plugin to use and along with being able to design your own meta tags and see updates immediately, there are tons of useful SEO features that can help improve the quality of your website! 

BuzzStream Meta Tag Extractor

It is important that you are able to extract meta tags at any given point and through using BuzzStream meta tag extractor, this is very easy to do! This tool extracts all meta tags on a web page and neatly places them in an excel spreadsheet, meaning that you can look them over and make any necessary adjustments easily. If you are new to the concept of adding meta tags and are hoping to have a team monitor them, this is a very good tool to use. 

How Markethinkers Can Help You Add  Meta Tags To Your Website?

When it comes to SEO, there is no better team to have on your side than our one here at Markethinkers! We are a group of SEO copywriting and professional SEO consulting experts who are able to take your goals and turn them into reality. Many people may be a bit confused by the need for meta tags and may not know the best ways to implement them throughout a webpage, which is why our team of experts have dedicated themselves to knowing the ins and outs of all aspects and SEO elements on your webpage. Whether you are looking to learn how to edit meta tags or are hoping to find a team to take over the nitty-gritty meta tag features that you need to be sorted on your webpage, our team of Markethinkers is able to help in any way that you need! For all your meta tag issues and questions, look no further than Markethinkers!