Meta content are the html attributes or tags that are attached to elements of your page. Technically meta content doesn’t actually affect your website SEO or your Google ranking. Meta content tags aren’t used in the algorithms that determine where you rank for searches. But, what it does affect is your click through rate from searches, helping you gain organic web traffic, which is why it is included in the SEO category.
There are four types of meta tags for SEO: meta keywords, title tags, meta descriptions and meta bots
Meta keywords
This is a list of keywords you have decided are relevant for your page. Whilst this used to be important back in the day, Google no longer uses the list of keywords to determine what your content is about anymore. Although, other search engines may still use them.
Title tags
Title tags are the text at the top of the browser that a search engine will view as your page title.
This is a user’s first impression of your webpage and what they will see in the search results. It’s also the title text that will be used in the browser tab display and if you were to share it on social media. So, this one is quite an important one. If your page is about ‘SEO – Meta content’, that’s what your title should contain, if the title to this page was ‘SEO and content’ you might have skipped by us and opened a different page that was more specific instead.
Title tag lengths
Whilst Google doesn’t specify a length for title tags, the recommended length is around 50-60 characters. Most desktop and mobile browsers are able to display that amount without being cut off. However, if it is longer, a crawler will still take it into account.
Meta descriptions
What is a meta description?
A meta description is a brief summary of your page. It’s part of your html code and isn’t something that’s visibly on show to viewers, unless you go looking for it. But it does benefit both users and search engines.
The meta description will help search engines understand what your content/page is about.
But it might also show up underneath your link in search results on Google, which can sometimes be the difference of why someone does or doesn’t click through to a website. Google does sometimes take a piece of text from your page and use that as the description which is why I say it might show up under your page title in search results.
Meta description length
Your aim with the description is to provide the user with a brief but informative description of what the page is about so they can decide whether they want to click on it. So, it’s length needs to be short and sharp. There is no set character limit, but it’s recommended to keep it between 50-160 characters for Google to read it best.
Meta robots tag SEO
The meta robots tag is something that allows you to tell a search engine’s crawler or ‘bot’ what they should do with the page.
Using this tag you can tell a search engine to index or not index a page. To follow or not follow the links on a page.
This tag is another important one.
Imagine you’re having a look through your website and notice something is out of date, rather than taking the page down you can use this tag to de-index the page until you can update it – this way no one can search and find the out of date info. And then once you’ve updated the information, you can change the tag and allow it to be re-indexed.
Hopefully now you have a little better understanding of what meta content is and how it can help with your SEO/ gaining web traffic.
If you’re looking for some help to clean up your website’s meta content, or even just need some help with mapping out future meta content tags, we can help you.
We help with all things SEO and it’s completely tailored to you, so whether you just need help with this part or you’re looking for complete SEO training, we’ve got you covered.
