How do you use SEO meta tags better?

Meta tags are essential for optimizing your web pages and content for SEO. When you try to learn more about these HTML tags, you are dealing with some SEO technicalities.

We know that most people (especially SEO beginners) hate technical terms and learn everything about the technical side of SEO. So we’ve simplified all these terms so you can get the most out of your meta keyword.

So let’s talk about what they are, their benefits, and how they can be optimized to improve your website’s SEO.

You are ready? Let’s dive into the details.

 

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are HTML elements that describe brief information or the context of a web page, and these tags are not displayed on the page.

These tags are found in the header area of ​​a website’s HTML.

You can view these tags by right-clicking on the page and selecting View Page Source.

This is what a meta tag looks like (an example of a description meta tag);

 

So, are you interested in learning more about these tags? Without further ado, let’s learn everything you need to know about meta tag optimization.

SEO Meta Tags: How do these tags affect your website’s SEO?

 

Benefits of Using Meta Tags for SEO

Let’s first talk about the benefits of using these tags, so you know why you should even bother optimizing them for your site’s SEO.

So, why are these tags useful for SEO?

If you’re wondering why you should use meta tags on your website, know that you can’t improve your search engine rankings without optimizing your site. The key word is to remember them. That said, here are three major benefits of creating SEO-friendly meta tags:

1. Content Relevance: Search engine crawlers use information from your web page’s meta tags to determine the relevance of your content. If you use keyword meta tags like title, description, and subheading tags like h2, and h3, which are similar, search engines will provide you with better search results depending on the relevance and quality of your content.

2. For Better Content Optimization: No matter how new or old your website is, if you want to rank the first page for a keyword, you need to optimize your page well. This is where optimizing your meta tags for your primary and secondary keywords will help you rank higher in Google search results.

3. To improve your organic click-through rate: Google has a simple concept when it comes to displaying the top three results on a page. It simply looks at how many people click on the first page results to get a higher ranking (if more people click on the third result, the ranking will increase to 5, 1, or 2).

In short, optimizing meta tags, such as meta descriptions, can significantly improve your site’s organic click-through rate.

Okay, I’ve said enough! Now let’s talk about the different types of meta tags and how to optimize them for better SEO.

Important Meta Tags for SEO

While you can find a ton of meta tags online, there are 6 main types of meta tags, which are listed below.

• Title tag
• Meta tag Description
• Subtitle tags (which contain h1, h2, h3, etc.)
• Alternate image tag
• Canonical tag
• Robot tag

Let’s talk about each of these 6 tags so that you have a better understanding of each of them, as well as how to use them to improve your site’s overall SEO.

1. Title Tag: The title tag defines the title of the document and is called.

The title tag represents the information people see at the top of the browser and on search engine results pages (SERPs).

The title tag is essential on every web page and is also the on-page SEO factor most important when it comes to improving your website’s SEO through on-page optimization.

This means you’ll improve your search rankings by optimizing your title tags for search engines, as they carry more weight in search results.

Quick Tip: Be sure to include your main keyword at the beginning of your title tag so that it gives you an added advantage in getting top rankings on Google (based on the quality of your content and the links you attract to the site).

 

Just take a look at the illustration below.

 

What did you learn from the example above? It is always better for SEO to include the main keyword at the beginning of the title tag (in the above case, it also gets number 1).

 

2. Meta Description Tag: A meta description is a summary or short description of a page that appears below the title on the Google search results page.

Most people new to SEO or on-page optimization don’t take meta descriptions seriously and often ignore even filling out the meta description. This is a huge mistake.

If you want to improve your search ranking for a keyword, you need to include it in your meta description tag at least once (but don’t use the main keyword in your meta description more than twice).

A quick tip: Your meta description affects your overall search ranking. Do you know why? Your meta description is what most people read before clicking on your link on the Google results page. By having a compelling meta description, you attract more clicks, which ultimately impacts your overall search ranking for that term.

3. Heading Tags: Heading tags contain h1, h2, h3, etc., which define the title of a document or section of a web page.
As you can see above, the h1 tag is the most important, having the most weight in search engines (and you should only use the h1 tag once on a web page).

The second and third most important tags after the h2 tag are h3, h1, and so on. You can use h2, and h3 tags as many times as you want. These h2, and h3 tags can usually be used in the subtitles of your page.

Here is a simple illustration that explains how you can describe your content or web page using heading tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.).

A quick tip: If you use WordPress, you can install a free plugin called Content Light that automatically generates a table of contents for your articles and pages by analyzing their content titles.

4. Image Alt Tag: Optimizing your images is just as important as optimizing your page, as you can also attract visitors from Google searches. Some people use Google image search to find a variety of attractive images and infographics and often provide a link to the source when using them.

So, if you optimize your images well using the right alt tags, you will not only be able to attract visitors but also attract quality links from various sources. Be sure to include your main keyword in the image’s alt tag (which is usually represented by the tag) for better SEO.

5. Canonical Tag: The canonical tag is usually used to prevent duplicate content or URLs on your site. The canonical tag tells search engines like Google that a particular URL represents the primary copy of the page. If you use a canonical tag, you can easily avoid all website SEO problems caused by highly similar or duplicate content appearing on multiple URLs and improve your website’s overall SEO.

6. Robot Tag: This is one of the most powerful meta tags. By using the robots tag, you can control what search engine robots do on your site. This means you can control which pages to index and which to ignore, and you can also tell search engine crawlers which links to follow and which to ignore (using the nofollow tag).

There are two types of bot tags widely used by bloggers which are explained below in simple terms.

“noindex” robots tag: This robot tag tells search engines NOT to index the web page so that it does not appear in Google search results. For example, if one of your web pages contains duplicate content or completely uninformative content, you can use this tag. If you are a WordPress user, you can use Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin to easily remove all unwanted posts and blog pages from Google searches.

“nofollow” robot tag: If you use the nofollow tag on a page, it means that those pages are indexed but do not pass any links to the linked page. These nofollow tags are mainly used for affiliate products, paid links, sponsored review posts, etc.

How to optimize meta tags for SEO?

Most people think that HTML meta tags are often only used by SEOs and bloggers, but anyone who manages a website can improve their Google rankings by optimizing these tags.

Optimizing your web pages for various meta tags is also not that difficult. Optimizing your page is one of the best SEO practices that gets you high rankings.

Before we discuss how to optimize meta tags, take a look at the following illustration:.

Meta tags have three main components that improve search results.

• relevance
• The Human Call (USP)
• Search engine friendly

You need to find the right middle ground (see illustration above) by optimizing your meta tags keeping in mind the 3 factors mentioned above. That being said, let’s talk about each of them so you have a better understanding of meta-tag optimization.

1. Relevance

When optimizing your meta tags, make sure you’re using content that is highly relevant to the keywords you want to rank for.

Knowing your searcher’s intent is key to creating highly relevant content and optimizing it using the right meta tags. If you don’t focus on identifying user intent before doing keyword research or optimizing meta tags for target keywords, you’ll end up with random visitors who won’t convert at all!

User intent can be easily determined in three ways.

• Informative: You can use these keywords when a user is trying to find more information about a specific product or service. Example: What is XYZ?
• Business Discovery: You can use these keywords when people are looking for comparisons. Example: XYZ vs. ABC.
• Transactional: You can use these keywords when a user is about to buy a product. Example: Buy XYZ
  Here’s a great illustration to help you better understand user intent and the importance of optimizing meta tags according to user intent.

2. Unique selling proposition (human appeal).

Create content for people and optimize it for search engines. This means that you should create content that targets people. Don’t use jargon. Use a unique writing tone when creating blog posts to ensure they get more shares and user engagement.

You can make your content unique by adding a human touch. Always satisfy the wants and needs of your target audience. Use a call to action at the end of your post to get more shares, leads, and comments.

3. Convenience for search engines

What’s the point of creating content if you don’t optimize it for at least one primary keyword? If you want to properly optimize it for SEO, you need to find and use at least one primary keyword so that you can use it in various HTML tags such as title tags, meta descriptions, etc.

There is a common mistake that most people make when optimizing meta tags. They often write long title tags or meta descriptions, (which are often cut off in Google searches).

The title length should be 65 characters, and the meta description length should be less than 150 characters, including spaces, for best display in search results.

So how do you know if you’ve used long meta tags on your website?

Google Search Console is one of the best ways to discover all the pages on your site with long descriptions or title tags.

You can find all the necessary information in the HTML Improvements section.

So, you can easily find and fix any issues on your website using the HTML Improvements section in the Google Search Console.

The 7 Most Important Things You Need to Know When Optimizing Meta Tags

If you want to use meta tags to improve your SEO, here are the 7 most important things you need to know to better optimize your site’s pages.

1. Stop using the same keyword phrases in titles and descriptions on multiple pages.

The content you provide in meta descriptions and title tags across multiple posts on your website should be unique, and you should avoid using duplicate content containing the same keyword phrases. Using too many meta keywords can hurt you!

Always be sure to do a Google search in advance using title tags to see if there are pages with similar titles. Completely change your titles and make them unique if you find similarities between title tags.

2. Make sure you have “highly relevant” content that matches the intent of your keyword.

Make sure that you include very specific and relevant content on each specific page where you are targeting the main keyword, and make sure that this content matches your “keyword intent.”.

Let’s make it simpler. If you use a meta tag with the word “apple,”  make sure you know the user’s intent and find out whether they are looking for information related to apples or Apple-branded products (such as laptops, iPhones, iPads, etc.).

By knowing user intent, and using similar meta tags, you can easily create highly relevant content that will rank well in Google search results.

3. Keep meta tags short and clear.

Then, how many SEO keywords should you use in the meta tag? As we mentioned above, six types of meta tags can have a huge impact on your website’s SEO. By keeping the tags mentioned below short and sweet, you can please both humans and Google’s search bots.

• Title tags
• Alternate image tag
• Title tag
• Meta Description

4. Maintain a proper title tag and meta description length.

Although Google makes many changes to its search algorithms, always try to keep your page title tag to less than 70 characters and limit your meta page description to 150 characters or less.

5. Be sure to use relevant keywords at the beginning of the article.

Brian Dean suggests using your main keyword in the first 100 words when creating a blog post or page. This will make it easier for search bots to understand the relevance of your meta tags and page content.

6. Stop keyword stuffing at all costs.

When optimizing for a main keyword, most people go crazy and include the main keyword in their content over and over again. This is called keyword stuffing. A black hat SEO technique that can penalize your site from Google.

Instead of stuffing keywords, you can search for and use LSI keywords (highly relevant keyword phrases similar to your main keyword) and optimize your content for them.

7. Know when to use canonical tags

The canonical tag helps search engines like Google easily determine which page is the original page and which is a duplicate page.

Duplicate content can be anything that exists;

• Mobile URL (m.domain.com/less, as well as the same desktop URL as www.domain.com/less)
• System-generated URLs (which are the same as those on other pages on your website).
• HTTP, HTTPS, and WWW Search engines such as Google will typically see http://www.mydomain.com, http://mydomain.com, and https://www.mydomain.com as separate pages and crawl them. an index. As such

The Importance of Using Semrush for Better Meta Tag Optimization

Have you ever wondered why your website is struggling to handle search traffic? Wondering why your website isn’t generating more organic traffic even though you regularly create quality content?
The reason is simple: your website may have SEO issues or technical issues such as missing sitemap, crawling issues, duplicate title tags, etc.

Unfortunately, most people don’t realize this and give up blogging altogether instead of finding the reasons for the lack of traffic from search engines to their sites.

The best way to discover problems with your website is to conduct a thorough audit of it. You can use tools like SEMrush to detect any technical issues to better optimize your meta tags and improve your website’s search visibility.

By the way, what is a site audit?

A site audit is the process of analyzing your site to identify any SEO issues (including desktop and mobile SEO issues) that may be preventing your site from ranking highly in Google search results.

A website audit takes a lot of time. By using the right SEO tools like SEMrush, you can easily conduct a thorough audit of your website, where you can easily find and fix your site’s SEO issues.

This is what a site audit looks like (on Semrush);
As you can see in the screenshot above, you will notice that it gives you an overall score (out of 100) as well as:

• Errors (these are the most important problems that need to be fixed first)
• Warnings (you may not notice these, but your site will still work properly if you fix them)
• Reviews (can often be ignored)

If you look closely at the illustration above, you will also notice that there are 3 main problems mentioned by the Semrush website audit tool: internal links with nofollow, more than one use of the h1 tag, and duplicate content in the title and title tags.

Moreover, Semrush’s website audit tool analyzes all the pages of your website and gives you a detailed analysis of all the SEO and technical issues associated with your website. Here are some problems that you can easily find and fix using the Semrush website audit tool:

• It checks if all pages have title tags (and warns you if you have pages with missing title tags, long titles, or meta descriptions)
• Checks images for alt tags (notifies you if there are images without alt tags)
• Check your website pages for overoptimization.
• Check the loading speed of all website pages
• Checks for duplicate content issues (duplicate title, meta description, etc.).
• Information about toxic backlinks (if your site has bad links)
• Overall website SEO score (the higher the better)

Not only does Semrush audit websites, but it also helps you in the following areas:

• Competition Analysis
• Keyword Research
• Domain Comparison
• Backlink Analysis
• Search advertising
• Keyword Tracking
• Social Media Management
• Brand monitoring
• Lead generation, and so on.

If you’re wondering about SEMrush’s pricing options, here’s what you need to know:

Semrush offers 3 pricing plans listed below:

• Semrush Pro ($129.95 per month)
• Semrush Guru ($249.95 per month)
• Semrush Business (costs $499.95 per month)

That being said, if you want to use the Semrush website audit tool, we have an exclusive offer for you where you can get a completely free Semrush Pro account for 14 days (you won’t get this offer anywhere else because Semrush only offers a 7-day free trial for its users).

Meta Tag Optimization FAQs

Here are some frequently asked questions we’ve put together to give you a better understanding of everything you need to know about these SEO tags to improve your website’s SEO in 2024 and beyond.

Should meta tags be SEO-optimized?

Yes, if you want to get more search traffic, make it a habit to optimize your meta tags for your main keywords. Always do keyword research before writing a new blog post, Research your primary and secondary keywords and create your meta tags accordingly.

How do I use meta tags for SEO?

If you are a WordPress user, you can install an optimization plugin like the Rank Math SEO plugin, as it will help you easily optimize your blog posts and pages for your desired keywords. It also includes all the built-in technical settings, so you don’t have to worry about the technical aspects of your website.

What is a meta tag, in simple words?

Meta tags are pieces of text that describe the content of a web page. Meta tags do not appear on the page itself but can be found in the web page’s source code (by right-clicking “View Source”). Meta tags are extremely useful for getting more search traffic if you optimize them for the right keywords.

What is a robot meta tag in SEO?

The robot meta tag is a special HTML tag performing two main functions. First: it tells search bots not to index the content of the web page (using rel=”noindex) Second: it also tells you to search bots whether they should crawl the web page for clickable or non-clickable links (using rel= “nofollow”) As a general rule, use the rel=nofollow tag whenever you link to affiliate sites, sponsored posts, etc.

Which meta tags are most important?

The first is the “title tag,” and the second is the “meta description.”. When it comes to using meta tags to improve SEO, these two meta tags play an important role. Thus, optimizing your title tag and meta description for your main keyword can increase traffic from search engines.

Final Thoughts on SEO Meta Tags

In short, meta tags are “invisible tags” that affect your website’s SEO. These tags can only be seen when you click on the “Show Page Source” option (by right-clicking on the page) and are easily read by search engine crawlers.

Instead of ignoring these HTML tags, you can improve your overall search engine rankings by optimizing them for targeted primary and secondary keywords.

So what do you think about the best meta tags for SEO? Do you optimize your titles and meta tags? Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below.