Meta tags are one of the most important SEO factors. One of the first things dissected in any site review is the misuse of Meta tags. Meta tags are at the top of every page in the header and are therefore the first thing seen. But, then they are some of the best tools for a great SEO.
Meta tags are not just description and keywords. They are a lot more. The list of different types of Meta tags is quite long. However, it is not necessary that you keep on adding Meta tags to pages that you don’t need. The less code you have, the better.
The Good Meta tags
The good meta tags must be available on every page, no matter what. Here are some of the good meta tags:
- Meta content type – This tag is necessary to declare your character set for the page and should be present on every page. A few options are listed below, but your web designer should know what’s best for your site.
- Title – The title tag is present in the header and it contains information that’s very important to SEO. You should always have a unique title tag on every page that describes the page.
- Meta description – Meta description describes the page to searchers as they read through the SERPs. This tag doesn’t influence ranking, but it’s very important. It’s the ad copy that will determine if users click on your result. You must keep it within 160 characters.
- Viewport – With so many devices available, you should specify the viewport. If you don’t, you may have a poor mobile experience.
<meta name=viewport content=”wide device-width,initial-scale=1″>
The Other Meta tags
There are some meta tags that can be used in certain circumstances, but can always give them a miss.
- Social meta tags – OpenGraph and Twitter data are important to sharing, but are not necessarily required.
- Robots – The Robots meta tags are not necessarily important. In terms of indexing and link following, if you don’t specify a meta robots tag, they read that as index, follow. So, if you want noindex but follow on the page, you would add the following tag with only the noindex, as the follow is implied.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”/>
- Specific bots (Googlebot)– These tags are used to give a specific bot instructions like noodp and noydir. Search engines are good at this kind of thing on their own, so, they are not important.
- Language– The only reason to use this tag is if you’re moving internationally and need to declare the main language used on the page.
- Geo– This meta tag is supported by Bing but not Google
<META NAME=”geo.position” CONTENT=”latitude; longitude”> <META NAME=”geo.placename” CONTENT=”Place Name”> <META NAME=”geo.region” CONTENT=”Country Subdivision Code”>
- Site verification – Site verification tags are sometimes necessary because you can’t get the other forms of site verification loaded, but if at all possible try to verify another way. Googleallows you to verify by DNS, external file, or by linking your Google Analytics account.
If you are looking to create meta tags and apply them on your site then you can take the help of one of the top SEO companies in India. They make sure that they do not use the bad meta tags and follow all the best SEO techniques. Check out the bad meta tags that you must avoid.
