What are Metatags and their Impact on SEO
A Meta tag is a code designed to give a search engine an increased amount of information about the webpage itself. Accordingly, Meta tags are apart of search the engine optimization terminology that has become the standard protocol that any webmaster or small businesses must harness in order to help their standings on the unique results algorithms utilized by major search engines. Whereas much of search engine optimization deals with directly influencing the results of the rankings, meta tags are aspects of the search engines themselves, designed to give both the algorithm of the engine and the users on the engine a clearer idea of the website. Meta tags are considered an implicit mode of information, as they are not actually visible to anyone but the search engine and the webmaster, hidden away in the coded <head> pr <body> elements of any web page.
As with any other form of tag, there are numerous variations on the basic meta tag: there are meta robot tags, which are designed to automate the accessibility of a web page for the provided search engines, meta description tags, which serve as useful ways for webmasters to specify a synopsis or summary of their webpage to present to search engines, and meta title tags, which are similar to description tags with the titular exception of specifying the title of the webpage more than the overall description; meta keyword tags, meta language tags and meta content types also outfit the available variations of meta tags, but they are not as fundamental as the main three types of meta tags, and primarily exist to give advanced webmasters to ability to push the customizations of their meta tags to its limits. Publishers, businesses and services that are mostly concerned with getting their website summarized for an enhanced descriptive property on search engines, preventing unfinished ‘beta’ areas of their website from being advertised, and marketing their services with an eye-catching title will find everything they need with meta description, robot and title tags.
Expanding on the functions of these primary meta tags means expounding the factors that affect search engine optimization; meta description tags, for example, has the ability to improve a website’s click-through rate by increasing the amount of words or phrases that the algorithm can attach to the website, resulting in increasing relevancy to a greater variety of user keywords. Meta descriptions should be less than 160 characters in length, concise and pertinent to the target audience, with mind for who might be searching for its services for content. Meta robot tags, which have been mentioned as helpful tools to prevent incomplete areas of the webpage from surfacing on search engines, can give webmasters greater control over managing the accessibility of their web page as it relates to search engines.
Such preventative measures can stop duplicate content and protect confidential information, but they also reveal the potential pitfalls in optimizing a web page for search engines without paying mind to the possibility that search engine algorithms may result in revealing areas of the web page that webmasters would not want publicly displayed. Meta title tags, while not strictly ‘meta’, are grouped together with these tag commands for the simple fact that they share equal importance for SEO work. Defining the title of any given webpage, business or service will effect the presentation of a webpage on both the search engine results and web browsers themselves, essentially branding a webpage with useful and descriptive keywords.
