Your website visitors are guided visually. When they see the great content, services, video or other cool things they find on your website or blog, they will share it. Now wouldn’t it be great if that wasn’t just a plain link in the post, tweet or Facebook share but a quick image sample or preview of your awesome content?
Meta tags make it possible for search engines and social media networks to get the required information from your website and display it in a visual way instead of just a plain old link. This will not only make your website better, but can also result in higher engagement, since the users have more information about your context and on what to expect when visiting the link to your website.
Meta tags are snippets of text and image which is declared by Meta code which is embedded in the head of the html code of your and provides a summary for that webpage. Typically Meta tag data shows up whenever someone shares a link to your website or blog on social media for example.
The 2 most common Meta tags found on any website are the title and description meta tags although the title tag is not really considered to be a meta tag is propably the most important tag on each of your web pages:
A title tag is the most important on-page SEO factor, 2nd only to high quality content. In technical terms it is a very simple html code which you place at the very top of your webpage within the head section. Google only allows about 60 characters or about 600px width of the title tag and you should include your business name and primary keywords where possible. The title tag for your webpage is typically displayed by Google Search, Social Media platforms, Browser tabs and sometimes as external links i.e. as the linking text used by other sites to link to yours.
The optimal format for the title tag is shown below:
Primary Key Word - Secondary Word | BusinessName
Meta descriptions are not very useful for SEO reasons but are very valuable for enticing users who will click through to your site.
The Meta description often acts as a pitch to potential customers who find your website through Google or via social media sites. While it's not required and Google can use text from you website instead of what you specify in the meta data, it's better to control the description text where you can. Try and limit your description tag to less than 158 characters as Google search will tend to cut it off after this amount.
Example of Title and Description Meta tags shown below:
Your website title
Expanding upon the title and description tags mentioned above, social Meta tags provide an opportunity to write a compelling title and description for shareable, consumable content. Eye-catching info-graphics, images and good copy can be integrated perfectly into your websites Meta data.
Once you start ranking it's important that potential clients actually click on your website which is where other parts of meta tag data plays an important role especially the meta image or open graph image and description (see below code snippet for social media).
The Meta image or OG (open graph) image is referenced in the social Meta tags. This image should be 1200px wide by 630px high to comply with most social media platforms, and is the image that will be displayed whenever your webpage, blog post or other object containing the Meta tags gets shared across social media. You should create an image that is catchy and sums up the content it represents, sometimes this can be simply your logo or if it’s on a blog post an info-graphic or another suitable image, most blogs including the ones that I install on websites automatically creates the social Meta tags for you.
Once your social media Meta code is properly formatted it will look similar to the example code below, this works for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Also note the twitter card section as it differs slightly but should also be included.
If your tags have been filled in correctly, whenever someone shares your website or blog post containing the social Meta tags it should look similar to the examples given below. It's important to have these tags because some social media sites may randomly choose an image or text from your webiste that they "think" will be suitable and may have undesirerable results.
Preview below shows how social meta tag information is used across, Google, Facebook, Twitter, LInkedin and Pinterest:
