When you have a website, search rankings are of utmost importance. In the past, meta keyword tags played a major role in search engine optimization and helped achieve high rankings in search results. This year, however, these meta tags no longer play an important role in SEO.
Although there has been no official declaration on the death of the meta keyword tags, the fact that there is only one crawler-based search engine that supports it has practically lowered its value. This also means that you have to learn how to use the other meta tags in order to boost your SEO advantage.
What are meta tags?
To start with, we define what meta tags are. A meta tag is a special kind of HTML tag, which provides search engines with information about a particular web page. These meta tags, unlike the regular HTML tags, do not affect how the web page is displayed. The information provided by these tags include who the page creator is, what it is about, the keywords that represent the web page’s content, among others. These tags are inserted in the document’s HTML code, specifically, in between the open and closing tags.
Since the meta keyword is considered dead, you may want to focus your efforts on other tags, such as the title, description, robots and the charset.
Meta Title
The Meta Title is actually not a meta tag because it is a required page element, and meta tags are only optional. Still, you have to optimize the meta title because it can strengthen your SEO and improve your performance on search engines. With just 69 characters available, you should be able to creatively use your keywords to attract visitors.
Meta Description
The Meta Description limits characters to 156 and you should be able to input some keywords without sounding like spam. To boost your website, you should provide a well-written meta description. This meta tag should be able to tell the search engine and the users what your site is about, invite users to visit your site and help boost your sites’ click-through rates.
Robots Meta Tag
Considered as one of the remaining relevant tags, the robots tag is used to specify whether a search engine should index a particular page. It is also used to indicate if there are links on a web page that you do not want to be followed.
Charset Tag
Charsets are important because all websites validate them. It is also known as the UTF-8 tag.
Since a character set (charset) is used to render a webpage’s entire content accurately on a visual medium, it is important to specify the character set as correctly as possible in order for the browser to properly display the page.
A number of web page optimization software, such as Google Page Speed recommends correct character encoding in HTML web pages, which should be specified in the earliest part of the rendering process. Doing so will allow the browsers to render webpages without parsing its code to find the character set. This can significantly reduce the page load time. Fast pages help strengthen a website’s SEO value. And this offers numerous advantages with regards to search engine rankings in the long run.
