Meta tags explained simply and understandably

Hardly any SEO area is as controversial as meta tags. They were often said to be dead, that Google would not pay attention to them, until Google finally issued a statement. Myths have been dispelled, here you will find the important tags for your website.

What are meta tags?

A website consists of a code, which is mostly written in HTML. Hints can be included in this code as to how Google should treat the page.

The most important meta tags for display in Google search results are:

• Meta Title
• Meta description
• Meta Robots

Meta title tag: page title of your website

The meta-title, i.e. the title of the page, appears at the top. This is usually fixed and corresponds to the page title. However, you can choose another title if it should be different for search engine optimization. If your page title is “Riding with professionals” you can choose “Riding with professionals – 15 expert tips” as title using the meta title tag. Although the search engine always decides for itself whether to accept the title tag, it usually accepts what is written in the title tag.

As a rule of thumb, you can remember that a title tag should not be longer than 524 pixels – that’s about 58 characters. It should not be much lower than that, so that you can include important keywords – but it should not be longer either, otherwise the title is cut off and looks unattractive.

Meta description tag: page description of your website

The meta description is the description of the page. Whether general or just the bottom – you have limited space to get to the heart of what you want the searcher to see here. Again, Google decides what is (or could be) more useful for the searcher – accepting the suggestion or taking an excerpt from the web page text itself.

This is decided individually for each search query, depending on what is being searched for.

As a rule of thumb for the length you can assume about 160 characters. For WordPress, or WooCommerce you can use plugins like YOAST-SEO or RankMath. Here you can see how long the text should/may be.

Meta Robots Tag

The meta robots tag contains instructions for the search engine bots that visit the website. You can specify that certain links should not be followed (see also Backlink Analysis) or that a whole page should not be searched at the moment.

The main specifications are:

• NoIndex – the page should not be included in Google’s index.
• DoFollow/NoFollow – follow the links to link (or not) to the target page
• NoArchive – do not use an old version of this page from the Google cache (mostly makes sense for news pages and for articles in online stores, as the content can often change)

As with the other tags, the information here is not mandatory for the search engine bots. As a rule, the major search engines follow the information, but there are also “bad bots” that index everything – whether intentionally or not.

Get meta tags optimized now

We will be happy to analyze your website or online store and show you where there is still potential for optimization. Good meta tags can put your website ahead of your competitors. Arrange therefore better immediately a noncommittal consulting date with us as on-line advertising agency under www.ebakery.de/kontakt/