Although many Seo experts these days discount the relevance of meta-tags when creating your webpages and blog posts, they are still quite significant in terms of increasing your CTR and consequently, improving your search engine rankings.
What are meta tags?
In terms of webpages, these are information sections that give the background information about the webpage to the search engines, crawlers, and of course, humans. The most well-known meta tags are: title, description and keywords.
Once upon a time these meta-tags used to be a staple for SEO enthusiasts. Optimize these, they used to say, and most of your SEO problems are taken care of. Later on people realize that the most important thing that you need for better search engine rankings is the written content. Page Rank also gained prominence when Google started using it for ranking websites.
How to improve meta-tags for better search engine rankings
- Title: Use all your primary keywords to define the title. Make it as convincing as possible. You normally get to use 60-70 characters for defining your title tag so use them judiciously. Normally it should be the title of your webpage (as it often happens with your blog post titles). Don’t stuff your title with keywords because then this can be counterproductive and you may also be penalized. If you have to use your company name in every page title, then you will have to be creative while making one. Remember that it is your title tag that appears almost everywhere as clickable text, whether it is the search engine result pages or on social media. So make your title tag click-worthy.
- Description: Again, you need to use your primary keywords in the description also. But since it is description, people should be able to get a fair idea of what your webpage or your blog post contains. You are normally allowed to use 160 characters for the description tag. As mentioned above, use your primary keywords to define the strongest point of your webpage. After reading your title it is your description that further convinces people into clicking your link.
- Keywords: People these days are not sure whether search engines take keywords appearing inside the keyword tag seriously or not, yet, nobody advises you against using them. Again, don’t spam. Include the most appropriate keywords for this tag.
There are many meta-tags that you can use in the header section of your webpage, but the three meta-tags mentioned above are among the most important.