Meta Tags

What are the main meta tags used in SEO? How to optimize meta tags?

Updated over a week ago

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Meta tags are essential to your SEO. These small pieces help search engines to better understand what your pages are going to be about and to rank your content. They participate to your website SEO architecture and improve your website visibility.
Oncrawl knows that well, that’s why we offer you the opportunity to access a full report of your meta tags performances.

Title

Titles tags are the main tags on which you should focus. They have a real impact on your search engine results and your page ranking. As they are the only tags visible to your audience, at the top of your browser, it is necessary to fill them correctly. It has the benefit to tell the user exactly what the page is about at a glance.
Oncrawl helps you check your title length and unicity. You just need to go to your HTML Tags tab and then to SEO tags.

Description

Meta description is a very relevant data to insert in your HTML. It informs search engines in a small summary what your page is about. It goes further than the title tag by displaying more content to your visitors in the SERP.
Even if Google has said that keywords in your meta description are not affecting your rankings, it can compel visitors to click on your site through the SERP if the keywords are the ones they were looking for. So meta description does not matter for its keywords but for its entire meaning!
Oncrawl offers a clear view of your description state of play. Moreover, you are able to verify if you have respected the Google guidelines in terms of description length.

Good practices to meta tags

1# Title Tag

  • Use your main keyword phrase that you think your audience will type

  • Write a 60 characters title to respect the Google title length

  • Prefer long-tail phrases: they have the advantage to target the ideal audience and to optimize your ranking on a specific field. Using just a keyword will get you lost in the wide range of results related to that keyword

#2 Meta Description Attribute

  • Insert a customized description tag : you must change it otherwise search engines will display the first sentence of your page content

  • Respect the recommended length : the SERP displays between 150 and 160 characters. Over this length, your content will be cut

  • Avoid duplicate meta description tag : if all your meta descriptions look the same, it will create duplicate content and also discourage your audience to open your page

  • Do not use quotes in your description : Google will cut off them. So if there are necessary, use single quotes instead of double ones

#3 Meta Robots Attribute

  • If you want bots to crawl your website from the main page and then to the remaining ones, use “Index, Follow”

  • If you want bots to crawl your main page but not the others ones, use “Index, NoFollow”

  • If you want bots not to crawl the main page but the remaining ones, use “NoIndex, Follow”

  • Then, if you want bots not to crawl either your main page and the other ones, use “NoIndex, NoFollow

 

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