The Essential Meta Tags for Search Engines
Have you ever created a website application, but after you release and search on search results pages such as google, bing. But doesn’t match the snippet (title and description) you expect?
That is why it is essential to install and improve meta tags on a website page.
Meta tags are snippets of code used to inform search engines about important information on your web page, such as title, description, author, keywords, etc.
This article will explain how to use and tips the three most important meta tags for SEO(Search Engine Optimization).
- Meta title
- Meta description
- Meta keyword
Note: Other meta tags help SEO, such as meta robots, meta refresh, meta charset, meta viewport, but we will not cover them in this article.
Meta Title
The title tag is the tag that contains the title that will appear on the search results page. An example of the title that will appear on the search results page can be seen below.
Code sample
Why is it important?
- The part that search engines will use to understand a page.
- As one of your website’s ranking factors, the title tag determines whether your page can be seen through keywords or not.
- Can affect the CTR (Click through Rate) of pages in search engines.
- MOZ explains.
- Google explains.
Tips
- The title must be under 60 characters because Google and other search engines usually only display 50–60 characters from the title.
- Unique.
- It contains important keywords and is not clickbait.
more tips can read in this article:
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/good-titles-snippets.
- https://ahrefs.com/blog/title-tag-seo.
- https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag.
Meta Description
The description meta tag is an HTML tag that contains a summary of a page. The meta description will appear at the bottom of the meta title on the search results page. An example of the description that will appear on the search results page is provided below.
Code sample
Why is it important?
- Can affect the CTR (Click through Rate) of a page on a search engine, positively affecting a page’s ability to rank on a search engine.
- The more interesting the content of the meta description, it can make a lot of people curious and finally go to your website.
- Google explains.
Tips
- The description must be under 160 characters because Google and other search engines usually only display a maximum of 160 characters.
- Unique.
- Summary of pages.
more tips can read in this article:
Meta Keyword
Meta keyword tags are HTML tags that contain keywords that will be processed by search engines so that your website is easily found on search engines.
Also, make sure to use keywords relevant to your content because Google and other search engines are very good at analyzing content, so you can’t just enter keywords.
Since I own a website, I want people who search for a frontend developer to find me. Then, I add “frontend” as a meta keyword.
Code sample
Tips
- The keywords must match your target.
- Must be relevant to your website content.
Moreover, I will write more articles to enrich this topic such as meta tags for social media, how to make a rich snippet on search engines, and how to make a featured snippet on search engines.
