There are different kinds of meta tags and some are very important to your SEO strategy, and not important at all. They are part of your Technical SEO and it’s good to know how to use them. In this article, I will explain what meta tags are and what they mean for your SEO.
Meta tags are pieces of text in the source code of your website that are not visible to normal visitors but are visible to search engines. They often contain important information about the entire website or the page.
For example, there is a meta tag that tells search engines whether or not they should index your website. A very important one for SEO! Other meta tags contain information about the author of the content or the owner. Many meta tags that are used do not make much sense or are unnecessary. Others are very useful or even essential.
These “unnecessary” meta tags are ignored by search engines. Sometimes they are useful for their own use or an internal search engine. However, they have no function for SEO purposes.
The title tag is the text that appears in the tab of your browser when you visit a web page. Search engines such as Google use the title tag as a blue-colored title in the search results. The length of the title tag should be approximately 60 characters.
The title tag is the most visible part of search engine optimization (SEO).
You can see an example of a meta title tag in this image (the top blue line).
Besides, the title tag is also visible at the very top of your screen, at the edge of your browser, also called the browser bar, or in the browser tab. What many people don’t know, however, is that you can determine the content of this title tag yourself! If you don’t, you will miss an opportunity to get more visitors to your website.
A good title tag for SEO always contains the keyword on which that page should be found. In the picture above, this is the term “Digital Nomad Puerto Escondido”. Based on several parts of the page, Google determines how relevant the page is for a specific keyword. The title tag is one of those parts. The keyword in the title tag increases relevance and makes your website higher in Google!
A good rule of thumb for title tag length is 60 characters including spaces. However, the number of characters cannot be given precisely, because Google measures the length in pixels and not in the number of characters or number of words. A sentence with many wide letters such as the capital letters W and A is more likely to be too long than a sentence with many narrow letters such as the “i” or the “l”.
Until mid-2016, the number of 56 characters was used; you were in the right place in 98% of the cases. During 2016, however, Google experimented with longer title tags and meta descriptions. After those tests, the length of the title tag has become longer! The starting point was around 65 – 70 characters until mid-2019, with 72 appearing to be the maximum.
However, the length of the title tag has become shorter again during 2019; I now use 60 characters as a rule of thumb and with many narrow letters and without punctuation marks you can sometimes go up to 65.
Try to push the boundary, but don’t cross it; a title tag that is too short is often supplemented by Google and a title tag that is too long is broken off (three dots). Below you can see two examples. Sometimes a title tag is even completely replaced by text that Google itself finds better (= more relevant).
Before you decide to put the keyword 10 times in the title tag; that is certainly not the intention. First of all, search engines will recognize that as spam so for sure it doesn’t get you high rankings. But especially because the title tag is, as it were, the showcase of your page in search engines. It should entice potential visitors to your website to click on your search result before seeing your competitor’s search result. A good title tag therefore not only contains the keyword but is also written well and attractively!
Of course, the technology must work well and your content management system (CMS) must be set up in such a way that you can easily write a title tag on every page. And if you forget that, the CMS must automatically put something in the title tag, for example, the name of the page in the menu, so that the title tag does not remain empty. But that is where the contribution of technology ends. Writing title tags is a task for editors and online marketers who are good at writing short and catchy texts. Look at the search results of others and get inspired.
The meta description is a text that cannot be seen on the website, but is visible to search engines. In the source code, the meta description looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Practical and honest advice on SEO and search engine optimization. SEO tips for the online marketer who wants to get started. “/>
The text in the meta description is used by Google as descriptive text (2 lines) under the title of the search result (see image below) and must therefore contain the keyword on which the relevant page should be found. If not, then Google itself chooses a piece of text from the page in which the keyword appears. The result is messy with hyphenated sentences that are closed with three dots.
A good rule of thumb for the length of the meta description is 155 characters, including spaces. However, this number cannot be given exactly, because Google measures the length of the meta description in pixels and not in the number of characters or words. A sentence with many wide letters such as the capital letters W and A is more likely to be too long than a sentence with many narrow letters such as the “i” or the “l”.
It is good to stick to 155 characters. In any case, stay on the safe side to prevent the meta description from being broken down by Google or even completely replaced. To prevent the replacement of the meta description by Google, it is also important to use the relevant search terms in it. But sometimes (rarely) Google does its own thing and chooses something else, like in the example above.
Until 2018, the length of the meta description was 156 characters. At the beginning of 2018, Google expanded the length to around 300 characters, but apparently, that didn’t give any positive results; in mid-May 2018, the length was reduced to approximately 160 characters. In mid-2019, the length was shortened again slightly so that we now use 155 characters. It is expected that Google will continue to experiment with the length of title tag and meta description regularly; therefore regularly check the search results in Google yourself.
The meta description has no direct influence on the position of your website in Google. Due to abuse (adding all kinds of non-relevant keywords), Google and other search engines have decided not to count the meta description (Google) or only very minimally (other search engines) for the position in the search results. Writing a meta description, therefore, has a different purpose.
Search engines offer you the opportunity to use the meta description to provide a short explanation about your service or product that is offered on the relevant web page. It is very important to make use of this. A high position in Google is nice, but you also have to “seduce” the searcher within one to two seconds to click on your search result and not on the competitors. In addition to the title tag, the meta description plays an essential role in that process.
A meta description should therefore be well written, contain the keyword, and end with a promotional ‘call to action’. Writing the title tag and meta description is a profession in itself, almost an art. SEO Specialists are often best able to write a meta description for both your visitors and for Google.
The meta tag robots is a tricky tag because it serves a very specific purpose, namely telling search engines whether or not they can index a page. Search engines are constantly scouring the entire internet for web pages they can save. This is done by so-called “spider computers”, also known as “robots” or “crawlers“.
A meta tag is in the source code of the website and looks like this:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />
This example tells the search engine two things:
When this meta tag is on every page of the website, it will in no way appear in the search engine results. During the development of a new website, this tag is often placed on the website to prevent Google from indexing the site while it is still under construction. Unfortunately, it often happens that when the new site goes live, the robots tag is not removed, with the result that the website disappears completely from Google. Put this at the top of your checklist for a new website going live
Many websites contain the following robots meta tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, dofollow” />
This tells search engines that they can index the site and follow the links. However, this is completely unnecessary, because they’ll do that anyway, with a frequency that they determine themselves.
For daily practice you can use the following rules of thumb:
In a good CMS you can set all of this without having extensive technical knowledge. If you find it too complicated, use a plugin like Yoast or Rankmath (for WordPress websites).
Meta keywords are keywords that are in the source code of a website and are not visible to visitors. They do not play any role in search engine optimization and do not have to be used. Unfortunately, there are still consultants, ad agencies, and website builders who claim that adding meta keywords to the website is important for getting good rankings in Google, but that’s just not true.
Anyone who digs a little bit into the philosophy of search engines, and in particular Google, will understand why meta keywords make no sense. A search engine not only scans the source code of the page, but especially the content, the texts that are also readable by a normal website visitor. Based on the readable content, Google determines what the page is about and what the relevance of a page is for a particular keyword. You can write whatever you want in the meta keywords, but search engines themselves determine what the page is about and how relevant the content is.
The use of meta keywords has no effect, so also no negative effect. You still run into them; websites where each page contains a large number of meta keywords. For SEO specialists this is often a signal that someone has been working who does not really understand how SEO works. Luckily it can’t hurt, but it’s a shame about the (paid) work.
Inserting a meta keyword is sometimes useful for internal use. Place the search terms of the relevant page in the field for meta keywords and your successor or colleague knows exactly where the page is optimized.
Google’s own explanation of meta keywords and why they are not used:
Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking (Matt Cutts)
I do not know exactly, but there seem to be other search engines that still look at meta keywords to some extent. But also for those search engines adding multiple, irrelevant words makes no sense. Use your common sense and keep your website clean from keyword stuffing. One day you will get penalized for it and you’re gonna regret it.
