Meta Descriptions

Meta tags are HTML elements that provide structured metadata about web pages designed to be understood by search engines like Google and Bing. This data helps these platforms glean essential information about your website content, which informs how they rank and display it within their search results.

Meta tags are important for SEO because they can influence how your pages are displayed in the SERPs, and how relevant they are to the user’s query. Some of the most important meta tags for SEO are:

• Title tag: This is the page title that appears as a clickable link in the search results. It should be unique, descriptive, and concise, and include your target keyword where it makes sense (51-60 characters).
• Meta description: This is the snippet of text that appears below the title tag in the search results. It should summarize the main idea of the page, and entice users to click through. It should also include your target keyword where it makes sense (110-160 characters).
• Robots meta tag: This is a tag that tells search engines whether to index or follow a page, or apply other directives such as noindex, nofollow, or noarchive. It can help you control which pages you want to be crawled and indexed, and which ones you want to keep private or avoid duplicate content issues.
• Alt text: This is a tag that describes the content of an image on your page. It helps search engines understand what the image is about, and also improves accessibility for users who rely on screen readers or have low vision.
• Canonical tag: This is a tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the preferred one, in case there are multiple versions with similar or identical content. It helps you avoid duplicate content issues and consolidate your ranking signals.
• Header tag (h1, h2, h3, etc.): These are tags that indicate the hierarchy and structure of your page content. They help search engines and users scan and understand your content better, and also signal what your main topics and subtopics are.

To use meta tags correctly, you need to add them to the section of your HTML code, and follow the best practices for each type of tag. You can also use tools like SERPSim or Ahrefs’ Site Audit to check and optimize your meta tags. It is best to limit them to 50 - 150 characters

Further reading can be found here: