Search engine optimization is of crucial importance in the competitive digital market. Whether it is to improve user experience or website ranking in search, both Title tags and Meta tags have a very significant role to play.
Title Tags
It defines the title of a document and is often used on SERPs to display preview snippets of a page, which is important for both SEO and social sharing. It is what the page visitor and search engine sees, and it creates value in three specific areas – relevancy, browsing and the result page. Title tags improve the user’s experience as well as the website’s visibility on result pages. Using them the right way can attract visitors to the site even if the desired ranking has not yet been achieved. Apart from site content, they are the second most important on-page SEO element. Following these guidelines can help optimize them for search engines and usability goals
- Be sure to have title elements for all pages
- The tag should be readable to humans and search engines
- Give importance to the order of keywords
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Maintain title length between 45-50 characters
- Give a unique title to each page
- Brand the pages
It is the most important single tag in a page that describes what the page is about and crucial to SEO.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are a set of hidden HTML tags that infer information about page content to the search engines. They are information contained in the source code of a page. They remain hidden and can be seen only by viewing the source code. According to Google, the description attribute within the meta tag is a good way of providing a short description of the page’s content for users. Google would use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if it thought that it gives users a better description than that which can be got from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions help improve clickthrough rates. However, you should know that Hummingbird considers web page loading time also as a ranking factor. Moreover, it’s important not to add codes that Google ignores. Meta tags comprise three things: meta title, meta description and meta keyword
- Meta Title – It is the title text that is shown in search listings, simply user created titles of a page that are used in three places such as SERPs, titles of browser tab and as links to a page. Making this descriptive, keyword rich and length fewer than fifty five characters can create better title tags.
- Meta Descriptions – These are user-assigned description of the page content and are regarded as one of the most important things assigned to a page for search engine performance. They are often the second impression a website can make on a searcher after the title. Making it descriptive without stuffing in keywords or brand name and keeping those between 150 and 160 characters are tips for a better click-through rate.
- Meta Keywords – The use of a few relevant and well-thoughtout keywords in the keyword tags help provide search engines with the bigger picture.
The importance of meta tags is that the search engines read them in order to see if the keywords and the description are related to the visible content. So it is important to create descriptions that precisely describe the specific page. In the case of news or blog posts, list the author, date of publication, or byline information.
Even though these two types of tags are not a full-scale solution to having an optimized and ranking website, they play a key role indexing a site and helping it get found in search engines.