The 6 Essential meta tags you must add on your blog

We know the role meta tags play in generating traffic to your blog or website. But, just adding some random meta tags doesn’t bring any traffic that you might expect. That’s because you should know what each of those meta tags does in the first place. Some of those meta tags are must in every blog you write and some others are optional depending on the type of content or page. All of these meta tags are included in the ‘head’ section of the HTML page. Here we discuss what are the 9 most essential meta tags you must include irrespective of the content of the page.

1. Title Tag

The title tag is the first and most important meta tag. It is used by search engines when displaying results in the search results page. It’s one of the first things a user sees on search results. The title tag also appears in the browser tab header. Sometimes, the title tag is also used when it is shared on social media.

Best Practices:

1. Keep it under 60 characters if possible.
2. The title should be related to the content of the page./li>
3. Optimize titles for target keywords, but don’t overdo the title with keywords.
4. The title should be unique for each page if possible.

2. Description Tag

The content of the description should be a short summary of the page. It is usually displayed just below the title tag in the search result. It can greatly infulence the click-through rate from the search result page.

Best Practices:

1. Keep it under 160 characters if possible.
2. Do not add quotation marks in description as google crawler seems to cut the text after quotation mark in search results/li>
3. Add your targeted keywords in descriptions.

3. Social Media Tags

Social Media tags are widely used in bringing traffic to blogs and websites. It really helps in engaging audience in social media pages and drive them to your blog or website. You should add meta tags for each social media platform along with their required attributes. The most commonly used are Facebook and Twitter

You can learn more about social meta tags at here (How to improve your seo by effectively using facebook meta tags) and here.(How to use twitter meta tags to boost your seo ranking)

4. Robots Tags

A robots meta tag tells search engines which pages to crawl or index and which one not. The various parameters of the meta tags are shown below:

1. all – Default value of “index, follow”, no need to ever use this directive.
2. noindex – Instructs search engines not to index the page. That prevents it from showing in search results.
3. nofollow – Stops robots from crawling all links on the page.
4. none – Combination of noindex, nofollow. Avoid using this as other search engines such as Bing don’t support this.
5. noarchive – Prevents Google from showing a cached copy of the page in the search engine result page
6. noimageindex – Prevents Google from indexing images embedded on the page.
7. notranslate – Prevents Google from offering translation to the page content.
8. nosnippet – Opts out of all text and video snippets within the search engine result page.

5. Viewport Tags

If you plan to use your website, this tag is a must. Nowadays, the use of viewport is unavoidable. Skipping this tag can result in poor experince for the users browsing using their phones.

You can read more about viewport here. https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_viewport.asp

6. Keywords Tags

This is were you should add all your relevant keywords related to the page. Or in other words, the words which will take you to the top of the search results page.