As web­site opti­miza­tion becomes increas­ing­ly com­plex with more and more fac­tors to con­sid­er, it can be easy to focus on the “shiny new thing” and divert sig­nif­i­cant ener­gies into them. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to falling into this trap on more than one occa­sion. A Pan­da or Pen­guin update kicks in and sud­den­ly we look at our sites like these are the only fac­tors at play. They’re not and it’s good to think back to some of the core ele­ments that can help con­sumers find you when they’re search­ing for a prod­uct you sell or an answer to a ques­tion that hap­pens to be your area of exper­tise. Meta tags, often ignored by brands and busi­ness­es, can have a huge impact on rank­ings and increase the vis­i­bil­i­ty of, and the num­ber of con­sumers vis­it­ing, your site.

Let’s look at the uses of each of the key meta tags, and why they mat­ter to your organ­ic search opti­miza­tion efforts.

The Title Tag

Tech­ni­cal­ly, the title is an ele­ment, not a meta tag. Regard­less, its loca­tion in the head of the doc­u­ment and func­tion reg­u­lar­ly sees titles includ­ed in the list of meta tags, includ­ing on Google’s page on meta tags.

With­out ques­tion, the title tag is the most impor­tant con­tent on any page. It tells both peo­ple and search engines what your page is about.

Most of the time, your title tag is what appears as the title in the organ­ic search results. So if you want con­sumers to vis­it your site, the title tag is your biggest oppor­tu­ni­ty to entice them to click.

In craft­ing your title tag there are a few key con­sid­er­a­tions:

Title Tag Length

The total title length that’s vis­i­ble in the results is deter­mined by pix­el width. Because dif­fer­ent let­ters have dif­fer­ent widths, it isn’t dic­tat­ed by char­ac­ter count.

Moz has devel­oped an extreme­ly handy tool that helps address this by dis­play­ing the title as it will appear on Google and even allows the user to enter the phras­es they want to rank for so you can see what impact the bold­ing might have on the pix­el width.

Clickability

You don’t have a lot of room to work with and you’ll like­ly want to include your key­words in your title tag when­ev­er pos­si­ble. So what do you do?

What’s key here is test­ing and tun­ing. Gen­er­al­ly, you’ll find that sac­ri­fic­ing a key­word or two for read­abil­i­ty pays off nine times out of 10.

For exam­ple, if you’re tar­get­ing a vari­ety of col­ors of wid­gets on a page, try focus­ing on one or two and make sure the title fits and reads decent­ly. Some­thing like:

Blue Wid­gets, Red Wid­gets & More From AllWidgets.com

Reads far bet­ter than:

Blue Wid­gets | Red Wid­gets | Yel­low Wid­gets | Green Wid­gets | Pur­ple Wid­gets | AllWidgets.com

Which would appear:

Blue Wid­gets | Red Wid­gets | Yel­low Wid­gets | Green Wid­get …

You may have sac­ri­ficed a cou­ple col­ors in the title but you’ve boost­ed the val­ue of the key col­ors and made for a far more click­able title tag in gen­er­al.

That said: test, test, test. Dif­fer­ent audi­ences, dif­fer­ent inten­tions and dif­fer­ent nich­es lend them­selves to dif­fer­ent types of titles. There is no mag­ic bul­let that works 100 per­cent of the time.

The Description Tag

The descrip­tion tag has no direct impact on SEO. How­ev­er, while search engines may not take into account the key­word use in a descrip­tion tag as a fac­tor, they do take into account how often users click on your site when it appears in the search results.

For­tu­nate­ly, this match­es nice­ly with anoth­er action you should be tak­ing: try­ing to get as much traf­fic as pos­si­ble from your rank­ings.

When cre­at­ing a descrip­tion tag you have 160 char­ac­ters to play with. This doesn’t mean you have to use them all, just that you can.

Anoth­er fac­tor worth con­sid­er­ing is that on mobile only about 115 char­ac­ters will appear. This means you’ll want to get the most com­pelling part of your pitch into the first 115 char­ac­ters, fol­lowed by some addi­tion­al (but less cru­cial) infor­ma­tion.

Using AllWidgets.com again as an exam­ple, you’d want to come up with a descrip­tion. Some­thing like:

All Wid­gets is a pre­mi­um sup­pli­er of mul­ti-pur­pose blue, red, yel­low, green and pur­ple wid­gets. Free ship­ping on orders over $50. A+ Rat­ing on the BBB.

At 151 char­ac­ters, on the desk­top this will appear the same. When chopped to the 115 char­ac­ter lim­it on mobile it will appear as:

All Wid­gets is a pre­mi­um sup­pli­er of mul­ti-pur­pose blue, red, yel­low, green and pur­ple wid­gets. Free ship­ping …

As with titles, test­ing is extreme­ly impor­tant. What appeals to you may not to peo­ple search­ing on Google, Bing, or oth­er search engines. Test dif­fer­ent descrip­tions until you’re sat­is­fied you’ve max­i­mized your click-through rate or at least that there’s far more risk of reduc­ing it than improv­ing it.

The Robots Tag

Just as it sounds, the robots meta tag con­trols the behav­ior of the crawlers. It doesn’t serve a lot of direct ben­e­fit in SEO per se, but is pri­mar­i­ly used to block the robots from index­ing spe­cif­ic pages.

The fol­low­ing are your options with the robots tag:

• Noin­dex: Tells search engines not to index a page. Adding this tag will gen­er­al­ly result in the page not appear­ing in the search results.
• Nofol­low: Tells search engines not to fol­low links on the page.
• Noodp: Tells search engines not to use DMOZ infor­ma­tion as a title and descrip­tion. (I expect sup­port for this to be removed in the near future due to the decline of DMOZ over the years.)
• Noarchive: Pre­vents search engines from show­ing a “Cached” link. If you don’t want peo­ple to know what the page looked like when it was indexed, that’s what this tag is for. I’ve always found the sup­port of the noarchive tag to be inter­est­ing as I can imag­ine there is far more use of it as a tool for hack­ers to hide inject­ed code more read­i­ly, but I’m sure it has oth­er pur­pos­es.
• Noim­agein­dex: Stops your page from appear­ing as a refer­ring page in image search.
• Nos­nip­pet: Pre­vents snip­pets of the page being shown in the search results.

Nositelinksearchbox

You may have noticed a site search box in the results for spe­cif­ic queries. Admit­ted­ly I haven’t seen this as often late­ly, but it’s still there from time-to-time. This meta tag stops that search box from appear­ing for your site.

Notranslate

Google will pro­vide a “Trans­late this” link on for­eign lan­guage sites if the searcher’s pri­ma­ry lan­guage is set to a dif­fer­ent one. There are many pos­si­ble rea­sons you’d want to add this includ­ing hav­ing con­tent that con­tains sub­ject mat­ter that aren’t eas­i­ly trans­lat­ed or that would lose in a trans­la­tion includ­ing sto­ries, poet­ry, com­plex sci­en­tif­ic mat­ters, etc.

google-site-verification and msvalidate

These are the meta tags you use to ver­i­fy your site for Web­mas­ter Tools in either Google or Bing. That said, I pre­fer vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er ver­i­fi­ca­tion method to adding more ren­der-block­ing code to my site, but at times the meta tag is the only option. If that’s the case for you, these are the tags they use.

Content-type

There isn’t real­ly an SEO ele­ment to this meta tag, but it need­ed to be includ­ed because it’s on Google’s list of sup­port­ed tags.

The con­tent-type meta tag sends to the brows­er the sig­nal as to the encod­ing of the doc­u­ment and the type of doc­u­ment. You’re prob­a­bly most famil­iar with UTF‑8 as it’s pret­ty much the default and is the most wide­ly used.

You can learn more about this tag on the W3.org site.

Refresh

There are times I’ve used the meta refresh ele­ment but it’s not rec­om­mend­ed by Google. Essen­tial­ly, the meta refresh sets the time after load­ing that the page should refresh, typ­i­cal­ly at a dif­fer­ent URL.

Once upon a time I used it for track­ing out­bound clicks to affil­i­ate sites to ver­i­fy their stats. Using the refresh allows the page to load (along with ana­lyt­ics) and then redi­rect. That said, it’s not 2000 any­more and there are a lot more effec­tive scripts for han­dling this track­ing.

You could use it if you only have access to man­age the tags of a page you want to redi­rect but no access to the serv­er or htac­cess files or anoth­er means of redi­rec­tion. This is pret­ty rare but I’ve encoun­tered it.

It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that a refreshed page that goes some­where else does not pass its PageR­ank. At the least you’d want to add in the canon­i­cal tag to the new loca­tion.

Conclusion

Review your titles and descrip­tions. Make sure peo­ple will want to click on them.

The meta tags that Google sup­ports, espe­cial­ly the top two, are crit­i­cal to the health of your site. Tweak, tune, and repeat.

Are you test­ing your meta tags to ensure they’re rel­e­vant and entic­ing users to click?