Generating content is challenging work.

Your site demands a lot of time, great effort, and huge resources to create landing pages, write blogs, develop custom infographics, and make videos. But all that great effort would lay waste to folks who need to visit your website.

Generating a great piece of content is only half of the battle. Today, with creating content, you have to ensure that it’s optimized for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to get organic traffic to your website pages.

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This is why you should get to the bottom of metatags and understand their significance.

However, when you become competent in how meta tags work, you can optimize them to build on your Google search ranking. The higher you rank, the more click you’d receive; it’s as easy as falling off a log.

More than 75 per cent of all clicks go to the websites that rank on the 1st page of Google search results.

The top result of any given search receives approximately 33 per cent of clicks. Meanwhile, position 2 and position 3 get roughly 15 per cent of clicks and 9 per cent of clicks, respectively.

Is it good to have your website on page two of Google? That’s close enough. Wrong.

According to Forbes, when it comes to the second page of search results, it only gets 6 per cent of all clicks – and that’s given out throughout the entire page.

So, we’ve ended up at a point in the world of SEO where sites can’t now stand to pass over meta tags. I’m going to clear up everything you should know about crafting title and description tags that will help increase your SEO value and improve your click-through rates.

What are meta tags?

I’ll start with the basics.

Meta tags are HTML text to style the content on a specific page. But you’d not see the tags on the front-end side of any website page.

Rather, these tags are put on the code of a page.

Meta tags mean to provide search engines with some additional pieces of information about what the web page is all about. The text, heading tags, and crawlers must have a great idea of what type of content is designed on your page. However, the meta tags give these crawlers even more to keep at it.

Note that your meta tags can appear in SERPs (search engine result pages), even if they aren’t part of your page. I will show you an example so you may understand what I’m referring to.

I’ll keep things as simple here as possible.

Searching for AONESOL on Google helps you see our homepage as the top result. I came up with a screenshot so that you may verify this.

But rather than the search engine just displaying a link to our website, there is more text underneath the URL in the search results.

This is the meta description of the homepage of our website.

At the moment, let’s go to the page. If you are on the A One Sol homepage, the text in the SERPs isn’t anywhere on the page to see.

See what happens when I search for that text that you find in the SERPs. There are no results.

How is this feasible?

This is feasible because the meta description exists in the code. A page gives the thumbs up to anyone to look at the code to see meta tags. What you need to know is where to look.

If you right-click on the A One Solhomepage (or any page on any site), you will click the view page source to look at the code. Even so, you can also use “Command + U” to view it.

You’ll be redirected to a new window where you must see a lot of syntaxes that may be hard to sort out.

Instead, you spend a lot of time finding those tags manually; you could use the “Command + F” search function to your benefit.

At this moment, you search for that exact text; you can view that on the page. To make it easy to understand, I marked this meta description tag in the screenshot above.

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Clicking it closely will also help you view other meta tags in this code. As we go on with this guide, we’ll be chewing over some of these other tags in greater feature.

Types of meta tags

As I just said earlier, different types of meta tags are out there that may show up in the code of a web page. According to Google, there are 9 meta tags and related things that their search engine accepts.

With that said, some of these meta tags are quite technical. But spending time laying out all of them is less important. So rather than this, I want to home in on the essential meta tags that greatly impact SEO and CTR.

Title tags

Do you think title tags are meta tags? Technically, title tags are not meta tags. However, Google deals with them and recognizes them the same way it does with meta tags.

While your title tag will still show up in the <head> of your HTML code, together with the rest of the meta tags on that page.

To give great SEO value to a page, title tags are typically used together with a description.

What’s for you here to understand about the title tag is this isn’t a thing that needs to be necessarily the same as the header of a page or the blog title.

The two may be different from each other. To let you know what I mean, here’s an example.

This screenshot of search results for the page on Search Engine Land.

I highlighted the title tag; you can see how it seems on the search engines. So, here is that same title tag, excluding those written in the code of that page.

As I saw it would, this title tag in the page source is the same as it’s shown in the Google search results.

This is so simple and easy to follow so far.

This time, look at the page itself.

Neither the heading on this page matches the search title, nor it matches the code.

You just knew that the title tag and headlines don’t necessarily need to be the same. For SEO value, you can make use of an alternative title tag.

In this scenario, “SEO Guide” would have better information than “Chapter 1” for searches. I’m sure this is why the search Engine Land has an alternative title tag.

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It would help if you cottoned on that the title tag must be the first thing internet users see in the search results. So, it should appear with a clear meaning of what that landing page will be about.

Make sure your title tag is crafted so real people can easily understand it while still speaking to search engines.

Meta description

I examined meta descriptions earlier when I showed you the example from A One Sol.

These snippets let crawlers and humans know what they can see on the page. This might not appear on the page, but it’ll be in the SERPs.

It’s worth noting that, technically, your meta description will not automatically become the snippet shown in the search results.

According to Google, the two ways by which the snippets are decided are here:

• Rich results
• Meta description tags

Google “sometimes uses meta tags to generate snippets.” This is an exact sentence from Google, a webmaster support page.

But if your web page comes up with a meta tag, that would be utilized in the SERPs. So, this is an excellent way to take care of how your website appears in search engines, in addition to telling crawlers what your page has to offer.

Make use of your meta description as a way to change your webpage from other sites in the results. Describe why your site provides exactly what people find based on their particular search.

Robots meta tags

Robot tags are more technical than meta description and title tags, so I’m not going to spend much time on them. However, these tags are worth looking after since they hugely impact SEO and CTR.

Examples of the types of controls used with meta tags include:

• noindex
• nofollow
• nosnippet
• noarchive
• unavailable_after
• noimageindex

If you want to improve your website’s technical SEO value, pore over my guide on improving your robots.txt file.

Metatags best practices

As I said earlier, you’ll need to zero in on both title tags and meta descriptions fundamentally.

Whether using it as a checklist, guide, or reference, ensure that you’re improving these two tags to benefit from SEO and CTR.

Never use keyword tags.

What is a waste of time? If you want to see what it is, just read other online guides about meta tags, and you’ll see too many “experts” telling you if you should add keyword tags.

As I told you before, Keyword tags are an old SEO strategy. It has almost been 8 – 9 years since Google reported that they don’t use keyword tags for rankings.

If you go back to the page, you’ll see that I referenced before that what type of tags Google prefers, even if I didn’t include the keyword in the list.

That’s because their crawlers are so up-to-date that they can extract the keywords from the content without even requiring those tags. Plus, it fends off the peeps from bringing totally irrelevant keywords to their HTML code for rankings.

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You may still want to add the keywords in your title tag, meta description, and heading tags. But having unrelated keyword tags will not give you any added SEO benefit.

Fight shy of duplicate description. 

It’s so important that every page of your site should have a meta description.

But if you’re adding the same meta description on every page or using slightly different versions of the same meta description, it may not assist when those pages appear next to each other in the search engine results.

Have a look at an example.

Users need help figuring out what to click here.

The meta description doesn’t make sense, so they’ll likely avoid reading the results and go on to another choice. Of course, this will play havoc with your CTR.

Bear in mind every time Google tries to incline the user experience. So, they notice duplicate or similar meta descriptions on your site. In that case, they may stamp out those snippets from the search results in hundred per cent when your site is getting indexed, which will be another damage situation for your CTR. 

Meta descriptions are essential to users when they’re making up their minds about what website they need to click on a list of search results so they can easily find out what they want.

For people who are adding a duplicate description as a shortcut, since they’re short of time and don’t desire to produce the description for every page, you should become competent in prioritizing.

At least, it would help if you had a unique description for your website’s main, essential pages. Get rid of duplicate and weak meta descriptions and depend upon the rich snippets to show up in the search engine result pages.

Be descriptive

A meta description needs to be descriptive. However, you’ll be bowled over how often I see the folks making this mistake.

This doesn’t mean you have an opportunity to add stuff blindly as many keywords as feasible into your page code. Make sure that you create an understandable meta description.

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That means that it only sometimes comes up with a complete sentence format. But with that said, it must include understanding the genuine peeps and crawlers. When you include keyword stuffing, Google can eliminate the snippets from the search results.

Prioritize the quality.

Let people look at something that needs to be shown on your pages. Don’t just get the shortcut and create the meta description that looks like your subheader. That’s not a good way to increase the SEO value.

Don’t use quotation marks

Bear in mind that your meta description is designed in your HTML code. The definite character would have an impact on the way it’s displayed.

What happens when you add a double quotation mark in your meta description is rest of the text that appears after the quotation mark would be cut off when it shows up in the search results.

So, know about it when you jotted down a description. It’s important to keep the special characters at arm’s length and move to plain text.

Conclusion

If you are serious about maximizing your SEO value, you will have to zero in on other SEO factors because you need more than unique, great content to help you. To get search ranking and CTR metrics, several other factors are at play.

What you need to do is to learn how to make use of meta tags to your advantage. The 3 meta tags that impact hugely on SEO, as well as CTR, are:

• Title tags
• Meta description
• Robots meta tags

For the most part, you’ll want to make important title tags and meta descriptions. You can access the robots.txt file when interested in a more advanced strategy.

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Use this guide of best practices for writing the title and meta descriptions that must have a huge impact on your SEO rankings.