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Meta tags are a great way of pulling organic traffic to your website. These tags provide the gist of your website and pages to search engines such as Google. Meta tags make it easier for Internet surfers to reach your website via search engine results. These tags are pasted in the HTML head section of your website. Creating and editing these tags in content management systems is easy and should be a vital part of your search engine optimisation strategy.
Search engines like Google usually show the tags when the searched keyword or phrase is embedded within the Meta tags. The three Meta tags most commonly used include the Description tag (describes the webpage), the Title tag (defines the title of the page), and the Canonical tag (identifies the main page) tag.
Let’s take a look at how to boost your website ranking by crafting each of these Meta tags optimally.
Description Tag
As per Google's official statement in the past, Meta tags do not matter directly when you’re trying to boost your page rank. However, there's been enough research done by leading marketing companies to indicate that the Description tag, at the very least, can still affect your page Click Through Rate (CTR) for the better. This, in turn, can improve your page ranking on Google.
To write a good description tag, ensure you don't duplicate the tags. Indicate a clear call to action (CTA) in this tag. For example, 'Learn More', 'Apply Today', etc. This is also the place where you can talk about any offers or discounts you have.
Title Tag
The Title tag defines your web page and indicates what it is about. These tags are important because they display both in the search engine results page (SERP) and at the top of the tab in every browser.
Title tags should ideally be under 60 characters. In general, the same rules that make any page title catchy, also help make a good Title tag. Thus, you can add words that define what the page is about. For example, 'Best', 'Top', 'Tips to', etc. You should also add numbers, such as '3 Tips to...'. It's good practice to start the Title tag with the main targeted keyword.
Canonical Tags
A Canonical tag is used to distinguish your page as the main page and prevents indexing of duplicate page URLs. For example, if you have multiple URLs such as http://www.dummytextplaceholder.com, https://www.dummytextplaceholder.com, http://dummytextplaceholder.com, and http://dummytextplaceholder.com/index.php, then Google views all of these four URLs as duplicate pages of the main page.
The Canonical tag was created to fix this problem of perceived duplicate pages. These tags should always point to the most important version of a page. Add this tag even if there is only a single version of the page.
Meta tags help in boosting website traffic in a number of subtle yet important ways. They should therefore be a part of your long-term SEO strategy. Use the tips above to create a sound Meta tags strategy for your pages.
Over time, you should be able to see strong, steady growth in the number and quality of your website visitors.
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