With each passing day it becomes more difficult to rank in search engines and the need to understand a little more about SEO increases. This includes meta tags.

But what are meta tags?

Many people, including those who work with digital marketing, have this same doubt.

Any detail can be very important to improve performance in Google’s SERP. But in this case, it’s a valuable resource for SEO and content marketing.

Interested in how meta tags can help you and how important they are? Keep reading.

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are bookmarks in HTML format that translate the content of a page to search engines. That is, they allow Google and other search engines to identify your content more easily.

They make Google find the best answer to a user search. This occurs through data such as the title, author name, date and other important information.

Its use brings a competitive advantage for a good positioning in the search engine results pages (SERP).

So, it is very important to provide the most relevant data for the search engine, such as the keyword, for example.

They are not visible to the user on a page, but you can find them in the HTML code.

To do this, just right-click and select “view page source code” in Google Chrome or “view page source code” in Firefox.

Meta tags are at the beginning of the document with the <meta> or <title> markup.

How important are meta tags for SEO?

Let’s say that meta tags make it easier and easier for robots to work faster and easier. This is because the markups accelerate the search for the most relevant answers for the user.

They establish direct communication between your content and search engines.

In this way, meta tags are important elements for SEO, since they work towards improving search engine ranking.

Top Meta Tags for SEO

There are many types of meta tags, but some are more important for search engines and, consequently, for SEO.

Let’s see what they are.

1. Meta description

The meta description is the text that appears just below the clickable title in search results.

A good meta description can attract more clicks and generate more results, which is very important for website optimization and SEO.

In this text you should make a summary of what he will find on the page, always with the aim of attracting the click.

Although it does not have a direct influence, it is always good to use the keyword in the description.

How many characters should the SEO Meta Description have? It should contain between 120 and 130 characters and should never be duplicated or copied.

2. Title Tag

The title tag is the clickable title that appears in Google search results.

Of all the other meta tags, the title tag or SEO title is the most important for an SEO strategy.

It is also visible to the user and directly impacts the ranking of searches.

Whenever you want to rank on Google for a specific keyword, you must create a page with a title tag for each.

The keyword should appear in the title tag as far to the left as possible.

So, let’s assume you’re ranking for keyword SEO. The title tag “SEO: what is it and how to use it” is better than “What is SEO and how to use it”.

Best practices for title tags are:

• Use a maximum of 60 characters.
• Avoid repeating the keyword, use only once.
• Put the keyword as far to the left as possible, the ideal is at the beginning.
• Do not use the company name in titles.

3. Meta keywords

Meta keywords were very important and used in the past, but today they are no longer considered by Google.

This is because nowadays we use the keywords per page and per article, so that each article has a relevant keyword. No need to save them all in a meta tag.

Also, they are never displayed to anyone who is conducting a search, so it does not justify use.

4. Meta robots

This meta tag establishes a direct communication between your site and the search engines.

Through meta robots your site can indicate what robots from Google, or another search engine do with your page.

It works through commands such as:

• Index/Noindex: enables or disables the indexing of your page in search engines;
• Follow/Nofollow: tells you if the links should be followed or not;
• Noarchive: directs Google not to display the cached version of the page;
• Nosnippet: instructs the search engine not to display the page description in the results.

You can see more here about robots.txt.

How to use meta tags?

In a practical way, how is it possible to insert the meta tags on the site?

For those who use WordPress it is very easy and intuitive to change the meta tags mentioned here in the article, and you can do this with the Yoast SEO plugin.

Yoast SEO is free, and anyone can use it. The settings of the meta tags are made individually by pages and posts.

In each post or page, you can add a keyword, a meta title and a meta description.

If you use Wix the ideal is to do a search in the Help Center, since each of the tags is configured separately.

Already in Blogger you can do this through the control panel, in “edit HTML” which is inside “design”.

Meta tags are between the opening and closing tags of the head element, for example, between <head> and </head>.

Beware of these changes both in Wix and, especially, in Blogger, which can modify the structures of the site and generate some complications.

Wrapping up

It may seem very difficult to understand and work with meta tags, but you should keep in mind that they help make your site more optimized for Google.

In this article, you understood what meta tags are and their importance in Google ranking.

In addition, you are now able to improve the positioning of your site from this. If you have any questions, feel free to drop a comment.