Meta tags inform the search engine about a webpage’s attributes. Effective use of meta tags increases your site’s relevance from the perspective of a search engine. It’s easy to peruse a website’s meta tags by right-clicking on the page and selecting “View Source Content.”
According to WordStream’s article, “Meta Tags – How Google Meta Tags Impact SEO,” there are four common types of meta tags. Meta keyword attributes are no longer a favored tool among SE optimizers, having been made practically ineffective by Google due to its abuse by “keyword stuffing.” According to the article, title tags are arguably the most important tool for increasing a site’s relevance. Title tags are the fleeting opportunity to grab the attention of a user and speak to SE’s at the same time.
Meta descriptions offer further detail regarding the webpage to search engines. “It’s important to note that the meta description tag won’t always show up in the results for a Google search (Google frequently picks a snippet of text from the page itself) but it’s useful in other ways. Google has also stated that keywords in meta descriptions won’t affect your rankings. However, a compelling meta description tag could entice searchers to click through from the SERP to your site, especially if the description includes the keywords they were searching for. And a strong click-through rate from SERP could indirectly improve your rankings.
The last of the four big meta tag types are called Meta Robots. An “index/noindex” tag tells the SE whether to rank the webpage in its SERP. A “follow/nofollow” meta tag indicates whether the SE’s “should trust and ‘follow’ your links to the next page or not.”
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