The whole subject about Meta-tags is so simple, yet so misunderstood. Time after time I see developers misuse (or just not using at all) meta-tags, title-tags and other HTML tags that can significantly increase/decrease your rankings.
Let’s start with the meta description, which is really the most important meta-tag you need to remember. First I want to kill a typical myth about this tag: it does not help your site rank higher. The only purpose for the meta description is to provide at snippet about the current page for Google. Now why is this tag so important? Because it gives you a chance to write 160 characters to get the users attention – this is what differentiates your results from the other results on the page. I have seen several sites having the CTR on search results improve a lot, just by optimizing their meta description.
Another important thing to mention with meta-tags, is that meta keywords is useless; it is out-dated, and no longer used by Google (most likely not by other search engines either). Generating or writing meta-keywords is a waste of time in terms of ranking and SEO, so just skip it. Save the bytes in your HTML for more important tags (like the canonical!).
Now let’s move on to some of the other important HTML tags. First of all you should always remember to use h1, h2, etc. where applicable. If possible also wrap your paragraphs into the p-tag, and in general make sure you follow the W3C guidelines.
A small tip is to take a look at your generated HTML (yes, go to your browser and use the view-source function), and read through your page. Now ask yourself if the page is easy to read? (Is it easy to identify title, content, and other objects?)
If it is easy to read your page as a human, then it is most likely also easy for Google to read and understand. If this is not the case, then you should probably start to work on optimizing your HTML.
To sum up, here is a small check-list when going through your HTML source:
- Always make sure to have unique title-tags (Google only shows 60 characters, but it will read much more than that, so don’t be afraid to have too long title-tags)
- Make sure to create a unique meta-tag description for each page. Never have the same meta-description on all pages.
- Use h1, h2, p, strong, em, and so on to format your text and content. A rule of thumb is that if your HTML is readable for humans, it most likely is readable for Google as well.
- Don’t use meta keywords, it is a waste of time and bytes.
This is part 3 of 5 in my series of Must-Know SEO for Developers. You can find all the parts here.
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