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Optimize your meta tags to improve the searchability of your site!
The meta tags are a very important part of the HTML code of your web page. They are read by the search engines but are not displayed as a part of your web page design. Usually they include a concise summary of the web page content and you should include your relevant keywords in them. Most meta tags are included within the 'header' code of a website. The most important tags are the title, description, keyword s and robot tags.
How to optimize meta tags?
The title tag and the meta description and keywords tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe. Besides that, you should consider the length and the order of the characters/words included in each of the meta tags. Note that the search engine robots read from left to right and those words that come first are more important than those that come towards the end of the page.
Enter your URL here to see a full meta tag analysis:
With the help of the SiteGround special meta tag analyzing tool you can see how well you have optimized you meta tags. To learn how you can improve them read below!
Title tag
It could be said that the title is one of the most important factors for a successful search engine optimization of your website. Located within the section, right above the Description and Keywords tag, it provides summarized information about your website. Besides that, the title is what appears on search engines result page (SERP).
The title tags should be between 10-60 characters. This is not a law, but a relative guideline - a few more symbols is not a problem. You won't get penalized for having longer title tags, but the search engine will simply ignore the longer part.
Meta Description tag
The description tag should be written in such way that it will show what information your website contains or what your website is about. Write short and clear sentences that will not confuse your visitors.
The description tag should be less than 200 characters. The meta description tag also has a great importance for the SEO optimization of your page. It is most important for the prospect visitor when looking at the search engine result page - this tag is often displayed there and helps you to distinguish your site from the others in the list.
Meta Keywords tag
Lately, the meta keyword tag has become the least important tag for the search engines and especially Google. However, it is an easy way to reinforce once again your most important keywords. We recommend its usage as we believe that it may help the SEO process, especially if you follow the rules mentioned below.
The keyword tags should contain between 4 and 10 keywords. They should be listed with commas and should correspond to the major search phrases you are targeting. Every word in this tag should appear somewhere in the body, or you might get penalized for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice, or it may be considered spam.
Meta Robots tag
This tag helps you to specify the way your website will be crawled by the search engine. There are 4 types of Meta Robots Tag:
Index, Follow - The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the main/index page and then will continue to the rest of the pages.
Index, NoFollow - The search engine robots will start crawling your website from the main/index page and then will NOT continue to the rest of the pages.
NoIndex, Follow - The search engine robots will skip the main/index page, but will crawl the rest of the pages.
NoIndex, NoFollow - None of your pages will be crawled by the robot and your website will not be indexes by the search engin.
If you want to be sure that all robots will crawl you website we advise you to add a "Index, follow" meta robot tag. Please note that most of the search engine crawlers will index your page staring from the index page, continuing to the rest of the pages, even if you do not have a robot tag. So if you wish your page not to be crawled or to be crawled differently use the appropriate robot tag.
How to edit meta tags?
You can edit your meta tags through the File Manager in the cPanel of your hosting account. You need to edit the file of each web page. The file contains the HTML code of the page( www.siteground.com/metatag_optimization.htm).
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