Metatags

I’m sure you understand the meaning of the word metatag, but here we want to explain its importance. They are online tags (text chains and HTML code lines), which are placed on the HTML code of web pages.

Metatags are used for showing the information in a very specific way, both for those who search for it, as well as for indexation robots created by the search engines. They are also relevant for SEO and for visitors to understand the information they will find on the page.

There are different types of metatags and each of them has its own characteristics, not all of them are relevant to SEO strategies. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn about them, and how to use these tags.

1. Correct use of metatags

Since metatags have two uses, improve the page ranking and define the information available on the web, it is necessary to understand how to use them properly.

In other words, the fact that the URL is in the first positions of the search results if later, the users don’t click on the link, because the title and description metatags used are not attractive to them.

For that reason, here are some tips to make proper use of metatags, to improve the results on Google and for your possible visitors:

• Character limit. Google changes this aspect from time to time, but now the maximum characters allowed for Titles are 55 and for descriptions are 155 characters. If you add more than that, visitors will see only some suspensive points.
• Keywords. Both in the title and the description, you should include the main keyword of the page and the closer to the beginning, much better.
• Do not use two identical metatags. In SEO, duplicated content is penalized by search engines. Therefore, you should only include unique metatags for each page.
• But that is also important for visitors. The meta tags you select must be understood by search engine spiders but also by people, so you should write thinking about people above all.
• Always publish new content only after having created all metatags. You should select all the metatags you want to use before you publish and index the page, as making changes later will take time and could bring several problems; that would affect your ranking on Google.

2. The most important metatags

All metatags have their relevance and can be used for a purpose, but to improve our SEO strategy, some are more important than others.

Here you have a list, where we highlight the most important metatags for working with SEO.

Important metatags

These are the one that should be unavoidably included in our pages, since they are vital for both search engines and users:

• Metatitle: Indicates the title that will be displayed in the list of results for a keyword. It should have between 7 and 10 words, as well as include keywords, be descriptive and encourage the user to click on it.

<title>¿Qué es email marketing? Trucos para ganar dinero</title>

• Metadescription: It is the summary of the content of the website shown to the user. It should have between 15 and 20 words.

<meta name="description" content=“¿El email marketing te parece complicado? En Mailrelay te damos las claves para crear campañas de email marketing, con total garantía de entregabilidad y para que puedas ganar convertir cada campaña de email en una fuente de ingresos para tu negocio.">

• Metacontent-Type: It is used to indicate the type of coding used on the page, with this tag the browser will know which characters to use and the texts will be properly visualized by visitors.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Metatags of medium importance

These are vital for many SEO experts but others don’t consider them relevant. But it is important to use them, so that the Google robot better understand the structure and content of our website, for instance Metarobots.

• Metarobots: Its common use is to inform the search engine trackers whether we want to index the page or not.

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Low -importance metatags

These metatags are considered as less important because they can only be used for very specific situations.

• Metakeyword: It is used when the website has an internal search engine, because the engine usually checks the keywords and thus offers more successful results.

<meta name="keywords" content="marketing, email, masivos, envios">

• Metaouthor: It is used to indicate the name of the author of the content, so it is useful to improve the reputation and online authority of a person.

<meta name="author" content=“Soporte Mailrelay">

• Methaating: It is used to indicate whether or not the content is appropriate for children. If you have content of this type, it is necessary to use this metatag to avoid serious problems and protect visitors.

<meta name="rating" content="General" />