SEO Meta Information

Meta tags are small pieces of text that describe a page’s content. The meta tags appear in a page’s code in the “Head” of the page and exist in the form of HTML.

Meta tags are little content descriptors that help tell the search engines what a page is all about. Meta tags draw searchers to a website from the SERP and thus are important in increasing the click-through rate(CTR) for the given web pages.

There are three major types of meta tags commonly used  –

1. Title Tag –

The title tag is the most important element in the site optimization process. The text which is visible on the browser is seen at the top of the browser. These tags have a real impact on the search rankings.

So these tags should be carefully used and be defined properly.

2. Meta Keyword Tag –

These tags are found at the head of the HTML page and they let know the search engines what the topic of the page is. These keywords are not visible on the page itself but in the source code of the page.

While Optimizing your keywords be sure that each keyword reflects the content of your pages accurately.

These tags were once the biggest players in SEO but now play a small role because the search engines have realized that the websites can easily manipulate the meta keyword field by keyword stuffing. This is the reason that now, the meta keywords are not an important part of the Google ranking algorithm.

As of now, these meta keywords play a small role in bringing the searchers to your site but in this competitive world of search engine ranking, even the smallest bit helps.

3. Meta Description Tag –

This tag shows a brief description of the page and serves as organic text. It usually tells the searchers what the page is about. For example – if you googled the phrase “opencart marketplace” you might get the search result as shown below.

Some other tags to mention, that will be more productive apart from the above-mentioned tags to bring in more traffic through the social media and increase the CTR are the – Twitter Cards and Opengraph meta tags for Facebook.

Adding these meta tags can have an incredible impact when it comes to marketing your website over social networks.

Twitter cards are pretty much exactly like Open Graph meta tags, except that there is only one network, Twitter, that looks at them. Implementing Twitter Card META tags is incredibly easy and provides another way for site owners to effectively market their site.

Twitter provides three types of cards that you can implement in the header of your website  –

• Summary – It is for articles and text-based content.
• Photo – It is similar to the summary but is self-explanatory.
• Video – It is also self-explanatory.

Here’s a sample of what these tags look like in standard HTML. All meta tag name attributes are prefixed with a Twitter:  –

Some Generic meta tags that can be used in all the card cases are –

• Twitter: card  – The card type to be created. Summary, photo, or video.
• Twitter: URL – The URL that we are going to use for the card.
• Twitter: title – The title should appear on the Twitter card.
• Twitter: description – The description that’s visible on the Twitter card.
• Twitter: image – A representative image for the URL’s content.

Image and Video tags require more a bit more information about the media itself, so additional tags like the ones shown below in the image can be used –

Twitter:image: width – The width of an image.

Twitter:image: height – The height of an image.

Twitter:player:width –  Width of the IFRAMED player.

twitter:player:height – Height of the IFRAMED player.

twitter:player:stream – The URL to stream as video.

twitter:player:stream:content_type – Content type of the stream.

Twitter video cards are mostly used as they allow users to watch the videos within their Twitter application. Twitter also provides a card preview utility so that you can ensure that your meta tags are used validly.

One problem with sharing your website information via URLs on Facebook, LinkedIn & Google + is that there is no control over the image and description text that accompanies the URL.

This information can be set via custom Facebook Open Graph Meta tags that are implemented in the header of your website.

Here’s a sample of what these tags look like in standard HTML –

Let’s see some of the META tags Facebook uses to allow you to customize how your website is shared –

• First of all, the meta tags are prefixed with an og:  then continued with the more specific property to be set.

<meta property=“og:{tagName}“ content=“{tagValue}“/>

• Image – This tag will direct Facebook to use a specific image when the page is shared.

<meta property=“og:image“ content=“https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/exampleimage.png“/>

• Title – This is the title that will accompany the URL, this will be the article or the page title.

<meta property=“og:title“ content=“Facebook Open Graph META Tags“/>

• Site_name – This tag provides Facebook the name that your website will be recognized by.

<meta property=“og:site_name“ content=“Webkul Blog“/>

You can visit the Facebook Open Graph page to retrieve details about each Meta Tag and its intended information.

The Open Graph protocol is a great way to not only share a page’s information but to also control how your site’s information is shared.

Using these META tags could be the difference in attracting just a few visitors from Facebook or attracting loads of visitors because your shared links provide useful keywords and imagery!

That’s all for the SEO Meta Information, hope it helped you out to understand a need in the SEO and how they can help increase the Click Through Rate. We will be discussing Robots.txt optimization in our next article.