Search Engine optimisation (SEO), three simple words but a powerful practise that can hugely impact your online presence in the form of higher organic rankings. So whilst SEO is a culmination of a number of factors/activities/tasks, getting your Meta Tags right is one of the important factors for the overall success of your SEO campaign.
Whilst these won't boost you straight to the top of search engines, they certainly are major contributors by improving click through rates (CTR) and encouraging people to click on your website link rather than that of your competition. Research done by many SEO experts has shown that a higher CTR can lead to higher rankings in the medium to long run.
What are Meta Tags?
Meta Tags are a snippet, a HTML Attribute that usually appear on the "head” of the page, and are only visible to search engines, providing concise summaries of web pages for search engines and website visitors.
There are two major elements that must be placed as tags in the section of a HTML document. These elements are:
- Title tags
- Meta description
What are Title Tags?
This is essentially the title of web page, telling search engines and visitors in a concise and accurate manner, what the webpage on your site is all about in 60-70 characters. Title Tags present a good opportunity to attract visitors to your site and improve the overall click through rates as these appear in three places browsers, search engine results pages, and external sites such as social media platforms. These snippets of text commonly appear underneath the blue clickable links in a search engine results page, describing a page’s content.
What are Meta Descriptions?
In simple terms, these useful tags are the short paragraph of text placed in the HTML of a webpage to explain to the search engine what your page is all about and appear under your page’s URL in the search results as well as what's visible when your webpage is shared across other websites and social channels. The end goal of this is to persuade the user to ultimately click through on your website. the more descriptive, attractive and relevant the description, the more likely someone will click through.
While the title tag is very limited, a meta description gives you a bit more space to tell users what you’re offering with an optimal length of 160 characters. Whilst Google states that these are not influencers of a web page's ranking directly, Optimizing the meta description is important because these can provide an indirect ranking benefit to the website.; Google uses click-through-rate (CTR) as a way of determining whether you are a good result based on the quality of your description.
How to write great Title tags
Here is a comprehensive yet concise checklist produced by our SEO experts in Sydney to ensure your Title Tags are spot on:
- To avoid showing an ellipsis “….”., the length of your title tags matter; keep these between 50 to 64 characters including spaces or as many characters as you can fit into a 512-pixel display.
- Just as important as the keywords themselves, is their placement. The most important keywords need to be first so they catch the eye followed by the least important words.
- Focus on getting your message across; include your brand name at the end of the title tag if it is not part of the important keyword phrases.
- Each webpage would and really should have different topics and information presented so each page title should be unique to avoid duplication as this will tags it will negatively affect your search visibility.
- Each Title tag should be accurate and relevant in describing the page and of course be compelling so a user is persuaded to click through to your webpage.
- Increase your chance of appearing in different searches by vary the keyword phrasing of your page.
- Most importantly at all costs, don't ‘keyword stuff’ title tags to avoid search engine penalties.
How to write a great Meta Descriptions
- Just as the case is with Title Tags, the length of a meta description is important to keep it between 135 – 160 characters to avoid the extra characters being cut off by search engines.
- Meta descriptions should be different and unique for each page to avoid search engine penalties.
- Avoid Keyword stuffing and instead focus on writing compelling and readable descriptions that actually make sense.
- Meta Descriptions are almost like short advertising paragraphs, the website owner’s opportunity to market their brand so do take advantage and write intelligent and attractive descriptions that entice a user to click through.
- Create a sense of curiosity with your words, just enough to compel your prospective audience to click and enter your webpage. Likewise, call to action is an important element to keep in mind. Provide the user with clear instructions on what they should do or what is expected from the. There is nothing worse than evoking curiosity only for there to be an anti climax!
- Use schema mark-ups like star ratings, customer ratings to add elements to the snippets and increase their attractiveness.
- Don't include double quotations and non-alphanumeric characters when writing Meta Descriptions however, if you absolutely must use quotations, then consider using " HTML entity rather than double quotes to avoid Google cutting off the descriptions at the "
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