Understanding Meta Tags and their Importance

 

Understanding Meta Tags and their Importance

Hello Readers, Continuing posting useful SEO and Blogging tips, this article focuses on the importance of Meta Tags. I have been asked by a few newbie bloggers to post about the importance of Meta tags, how they help in optimizing blogs and how to use them. I am writing this post so that all the newbie bloggers could be benefited and share this information. Later in this article we will explore some great and useful information about Meta tags and how they help you improve your blog SEO.

What are Meta Tags?

In general Meta word is used for describing the data about some data. In blogging, it has the same meaning. It informs the search engines about the main data about your blog. Meta tags are the one of those basic elements of your blog that contributes towards the strong foundation of advance SEO of your blog.

Why are Meta tags Important?

Search engines do not share much information about how they use our Meta information. But SEO experts believe that every Meta tag has its own importance and weightage in SEO. If you talk about Title and Description Meta tags; they are used by search engines to display the search results. You can see that your posts title and description is visible in the SERP (search engine results page).

What Meta Tags to focus?

There are many Meta tags that can be included in your blog. But you should be focusing more on Meta title, Meta description and Meta keywords tags. Every tag has its own length limits so you need to write optimal Meta tags.

Now we shall see how to write Meta tags. Before going further let us see the basic structure of a Meta tag:

<meta name=”Meta-Tag-Name” content=”Meta-Tag-Content” />

Meta tags are placed just under the opening head tag of your template. Meta tags have two important arguments- name and content. The name field contains the type of the Meta tag like keyword, description or title and Content field contains the data associated with title, keyword or description. Now I hope you are a little familiar with these tags and we shall move further to explore more about these tags.

Meta Title:

Meta title tag holds the title of your blog post. This tag is the most important Meta tag and conveys the abstract information about the webpage to the search engines. The title should not be more than 70 characters including white spaces. You can see the Meta title tags in the search results on the top of the description. A lengthy Title tag (exceeding 70 characters) will be trimmed in the search results. Always write concise but descriptive titles for your posts. You should also check how to optimizeyour post titles to increase your posts visibility in the search results.

Meta Description:

Meta description tag holds the description about the webpage or blog post. As shown in the above screenshot the description is visible in the search results just beneath the title tag and hence it is very important to write an optimized Meta description tag. The limit for this tag is set to 160 characters. Make sure that there is no more than 1 Meta description tag on your webpage. You can fix the duplicate or re occurring Meta description tags using the blogger pagetype conditions.

Meta Keywords:

Meta keywords tag used to be an important factor in the Google Page ranks but now Google does not consider the Meta keywords tags for providing page ranks to any blog. Meta keywords tag includes the main keywords for your main content. You can do a keyword research using Google Adwords keyword tool to identify the most suitable keywords of your blog and include them in this tag. Make sure you do not use useless and non-related keywords. Mention 5-7 closely related keywords to the content on the webpage in this tag.

I hope I have cleared doubts of many people by providing all this information. If you have any doubt regarding any information provided in this article, please comment here. I will be glad to help you.

You can check out our blogger tips and tricks section for more blogging and seo related articles on our blog. It will improve your blogging expereice.

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