benefits of meta tag
Benefits of Meta Tag – As a website or blog owner, we will certainly be happy if our website can appear on the first page of search results or SERPs. Appearing on the first page, especially at the top, will make the website visited by many internet users. However, many efforts or optimizations need to be done so that the website appears in the best position, one of which is the optimization of the meta tags of the website.
By the way, have you heard of what meta tags are before? This time, we will discuss further meta tags, starting from their understanding, types, and functions to how to install them.
Table of Contents
What are Meta Tags
Meta tags are a series of codes that contain metadata information or a description of a content or website page. Meta elements are created in the form of HTML code that is placed after the <head> code in the header of a website. So, the meta tags are not in the content directly.
But even if the meta tag is placed in the site header, you don’t need to worry, there are special tools or tools that you can use to prepare and optimize the meta tag. We will discuss this later, before that let us further identify the types and functions of meta tags first.
Types of Meta Tags
If earlier we discussed the meaning of meta tags, this time we will explain the types of meta tags. Meta tags or meta tags are divided into 3 types, namely meta title, meta description, and meta keywords. What are the differences between the three meta tags? Let’s discuss this further.
Meta Title
When you use a search engine to find certain information, you’re bound to come across some list of websites on the search results page or SERP, right? The various websites appear with content titles related to the keywords you enter.
The title that appears is called the meta title or title tag. If you click on the title, then you will be redirected to a page from that website or site. The title in the meta title can be the same or even different from the original title of the page.
Meta Description
A meta description is a summary or snippet in the form of short text. The length of this text is generally 70-155 characters. You can use the meta description to explain to the reader a summary of the contents of your website page.
Similar to the meta title, the meta description can be optimized in such a way that your website has the opportunity to appear at the top of the SERP and get high traffic. One way is to include keywords in the meta description. The following is an example of a meta description, the phrases in bold are the keywords of the article.
Meta Keyword
Meta keywords are tags that contain information about keywords on web pages. Applying meta keywords will help search engines to identify well the content of your website. With meta keywords, search engines will find keywords more easily.
Although you can optimize keywords with meta keywords, you should not try to trick search engines with keywords that are not in the content, because their algorithms are getting better at spotting fraud.
Well, of the three types of meta tags above, meta title and meta description are the most common meta elements optimized by webmasters. But even so, you can optimize all three.
Meta Tag Functions
The existence of meta tags on a website is arguably very important because meta tags function to make search engines know the site well, so they can get high rankings in search results. This is because the meta tag contains important information needed by the search engine crawler robot itself.
Without meta tags, search engines will pick random words in website content and that’s not good for SEO. Therefore, it can be concluded that meta tags are very useful in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
How, interested in using meta tags? If so, below we attach how to use and optimize meta tags on your website.
Install Yoast SEO First
The first thing you need to do is install the Yoast SEO plugin. Indeed, besides Yoast SEO there are many other WordPress SEO plugins, but we deliberately chose Yoast because this plugin is one of the most common and easy to use.
Well, after successfully installing and activating the Yoast SEO plugin, then start creating new pages or posts on the website. You can see the Yoast SEO box under your post/page editor. It looks like this.
Enter Optimized Keywords
The next step is to enter keywords that can be optimized in the “Main keyword phrase” box. A little information, Yoast does not support the creation of meta keywords because Google itself, as the largest search engine, no longer uses meta keywords to rank websites. So you can just use the Yoast keyword field.
Yoast will use the keywords you wrote down to analyze how SEO-friendly the content you have created on that page is. This will greatly facilitate the optimization of On-Page SEO. Here is an example.
Add Meta Title
After adding keywords, you can add a meta title or SEO title to the page you create. If you want to use the same title as the page title, you don’t need to change anything, just leave it as is. However, if you want to change the title to make it more optimized, please change the title by removing the default settings first.
Add Meta Description
The last step you can do is add a meta description for the page. Please write a summary of the content of your page, making sure you include keywords in the summary. Write until Yoast shows a green bar or bar below the meta description box.
After performing the steps above, you can check the “SEO Analysis” section to see Yoast’s suggestions for on-page SEO optimization of your page. Try to get a green icon so that your page can appear better on search results pages. If so, please publish or update your content. Yoast SEO can be very helpful in adding meta tags without having to manually edit the HTML code.
Conclusion
The meta tag is an element in HTML that can serve to introduce the content or content of a website on search engines. The search engines use crawler robots to recognize every page on the internet. Meta tags simplify the work of the crawler robot so that it can get the right information. That fact makes meta tag optimization one of the optimization techniques in SEO.
Well, you can use this meta tag to increase the visibility of your site on Google or other search engines. If you are using WordPress, please use Yoast SEO earlier. However, if your website is not yet based on WordPress, Master web has the best SSD WordPress hosting that can help you have a website with the best performance, both for your personal and business.
Thanks for reading.
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