How To Add Meta Tags To Your Website

Adding Meta Tags to your website is essential and can help improve the visibility of your website. But what are Meta Tags, and how do you make sure you have added them correctly? Read on to find out!

What are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are little pieces of data that help search engines better understand what a web page is about. Several different types of meta tags can be added to a website, but ones that are most influential when it comes to SEO optimization are your Title Tags and Meta Description Tags.

Why is it important to add Meta Tags?

Meta Tags play a crucial role when it comes to improving your organic click-through rate. When a search engine crawls your site, they will pull the snippets of information from your Title Tag and Meta Description and use these to inform how your pages will be listed in organic search results. 

What is a Title Tag? 

A Title Tag is your contents main title. It is what you use to entice your audience to click to find out more. A Title Tag appears in the web browser as well as the search engine results page and choosing wisely will ensure that your ranking and click through rate (CTR) remain high. To optimize your Title Tag, you need to ensure that you include your target keyword and that it reveals what the page that it leads to is about. A well optimized Meta Title will use the keyword at the start and be short and sweet – under 55 characters is best as this means it won’t get cut off by Google.

What is a Meta Description?

A Meta Description is what appears below your title tag in search engine results and will give readers more of an insight into what your content is about. Here you have an opportunity to describe the material in the most appealing way, as accurately as possible. Again you need to use your target keyword but also ensure that your Meta Description is relevant and well-written to give it the most appeal and deliver the most significant impact on your CTR. It’s also important not to stuff your Meta Description with your keyword as you could be penalized by Google for doing so, thus doing your SEO more harm than good. Try to talk advantage of the full 160 character limit while also not going above this, so your description doesn’t get cut off mid-sentence. 

Adding Meta Tags to your site – step by step

Open your text editing program

Log into your web hosting account

Open the relevant page in the text editor

In the portion of the file, input the meta content. 

Save

Upload the page to the server

Adding Meta Tags to your site is well worth doing – so if you haven’t already, take the time to do this for all existing and new web pages and you should see a difference in both your SEO and CTR.