What are Meta Tags?

As an online writer, meta tagging is an important feature that helps with search engine organization. Meta tags enhance the user experience and presentation of your business’s image, statistics and data.

What are meta tags? Meta tags are text pieces that provide information related to what program is being used to construct a web page, the web page’s description, and other relevant keywords that are discussed on the page.

These digital marketing features of the World Wide Web provide enhancements in sales, networking, and popularity for any business that uses them. Certain meta tags do more enhancement while others could supply less that a business expects.

What are Meta Tags Used For?

You can find meta tags in the title or head segment of an HTML document, and must be coded in your CMS as such. Meta tags are an integral part of strong search engine optimization. Web browsers such as Google use meta-tags to define page description, relative keywords, the name of the document author, the date the page was last modified, and other metadata.

Meta tags are critical as they influence not only how your webpage performs in the SERPs but how many visitors are likely to explore your webpage. Therefore, they will increase your traffic and audience engagement which can influence your SEO and rankings.

Data dictionaries, which store metadata, are the part of the database that contains information about the different sets of records and fields, such as their source and who may change them.

Do Meta Tags Help Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is defined as “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine”. It is a useful tactic for businesses in marketing and advertising.

Using online search engines has transformed the lives of consumers and businesses into a competitive environment of an advertising market. Businesses strive to obtain a competitive advantage near the top of every search engine page, such as Google.

In order to do so, meta tagging must take place for companies’ websites to peak at the top of a consumer’s search result. Meta tagging extracts the important keywords of a webpage to appear for specific search results.

What is a Meta Tag Example?

Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines use meta tags to obtain metadata in order to better understand specific web page details. Metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.

An example of a meta tag includes elements such as <title> and <description>.

Different Types of Meta Tags

There are numerous types of metadata that can vary in importance in your marketing work. “Good” meta tags that should be on every webpage, such as the title, description, and viewport, allow your web design to create a beneficial reading experience for mobile users and web browsers. Here is a list of some of the most commonly used meta tags:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Canonical tag
• Alternative text tag
• Robots meta tag
• Open graph meta tags and Twitter cards
• Header tags
• Responsive design meta tag

Title Tag

Title tags are used in the most descriptive and reliable manner imaginable to inform search engines and guests what every particular page on your web is about.

Description Tag

The meta description tag in HTML is a 160 character excerpt used to represent the content of a web page. Search engines often use these samples to let users know what the website is about before they click on it.

Canonical Tag

A canonical tag (aka “rel canonical”) is a means of informing search engines that the master copy of a website is represented by a particular URL. Using the canonical tag avoids issues that occur on different URLs due to the same or “duplicate” material.

“Alt text” Tag

Alt text (alternative text), also known as “alt descriptions,” or technically inaccurate as “alt tags,” is used in an HTML code to define a page’s appearance and purpose.

Robots meta tag

A robots meta tag is a tag which instructs and informs your search engine on what to follow and what not to follow. This is a segment of coding that can be found in your webpage’s < head > section. It’s a basic code that allows you the freedom to select which pages to cover from search engine crawlers, and which pages to index and look at.

Open graph meta tags

Open Graph meta tags are pieces of code that will dictate how any hyperlinked URLs are viewed when seen across social media or other public platforms.

You can find open graph meta tags in the < head > section of the web page. Any tags with og: before the text in your HTML code are Open Graph meta tags.

Header tags

HTML header tags can be used to separate the title headings (known as h1) and subheadings (known as h2-h6) of a website from the bulk of the information. Header tags are also recognised to website designers as heading tags. The higher the number of your “h#” signifies less importance. “H1” tags envelop the big idea of your page, while “h6” tags pick up the details of the details of… you get the picture.

Responsive design meta tag

Responsive meta tags typically appear in HTML code in ways such as:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width”>. These meta tags are “responsive” by using HTML to adapt to the size of your device’s screen, whether on an eBook, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.

Tip: If you change the value of this meta tag with JavaScript, the tag will still work, however the page must adapt to the new value. Either delete the whole responsive data meta tag and replace it, or modify the attribute name. While this does not frequently happen when coding in HTML, it can come up as an issue for some people.

How Do I Create A Meta Tag?

Creating a meta tag can range in its simplicity or difficulty depending on what kind of meta tag you need to form. The most simple HTML meta tag imaginable is made of two key components: your title and body text.

Place your meta tags in the heading section of your page. Start simply by making a title and a description. For example, the title could become “Activities to do During Coronavirus Quarantine”, while the example would be “fun things to do while social distancing”.

Here is an image example of what your generic title and description meta tags will look like:

Author

Cedric Miller is an experienced copywriter and SEO who is passionate about learning the intricacies and best practices of successful persuasive writing and rhetoric. To visit my blog follow this link https://www.cedricmiller.com/