Meta tags, title tags and dead links are some basic SEO concepts or components that you’ll often hear about. Their importance and relevance in the world of SEO may rise and fall with Google making more than 500 algorithm changes every year, but they still count when you want to boost your site’s credibility and search visibility.  

Meta tags, title tags and dead links can all affect the search ranking of your website, so it’s important to understand some fundamentals around these terms. In part three of our on-page SEO series, we’ll dive deeper into these concepts and how they impact your website’s on-page SEO. 

Meta Tags — Do You Still Need Them?  

Google defines meta tags as “a great way for Webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. (They) can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. (They) are added to the <head> section of your HTML page.” 

Meta tags have been around for a long time; in the initial days of SEO, stuffing a website with keywords and meta tags almost guaranteed high rankings in the SERPs. Because of such abuse, Google ruled out meta tags from its list of ranking factors. Today, they may no longer play a major role in ranking your site, but they are still important for your site’s SEO. 

Use Meta Tags for Reasons Other Than Ranking  

As aforementioned, it’s a well-accepted belief that meta tags are not used by search engines for ranking purposes, but Google often uses the information from the meta tags, among many other signals, to classify pages, or display snippets about a page in SERPs. For this reason, meta tags can be very useful for improving how the link info is displayed in the SERPs and increasing click-through rates of your site. 

Even though meta tags are words that are hidden in your code and can’t be viewed by users browsing your site, they help describe any page in a machine-readable format. This is one of the biggest advantage of using meta tags. When SERPs look for information, they look for the keywords included in your meta tags.  

Meta tags can also be used to include commonly misspelled keywords, or synonyms. While you cannot include misspelled words on your website for your audience to see, you can use them in your meta tags. Including synonyms of your keywords in your meta tag allows you to target users using those synonymous search terms and attract more traffic to your site.  

Important Meta Tags You Should Know About 

  1. Title – The title tag is the title text that is visible in the search engine results. While this is not necessarily a meta tag, it functions like one. More on this in the next section.  
  2. Description – Your site’s summary goes in the meta description tag. This is the place to describe your site and what it offers. This helps searchers see what your page is all about as they read through the SERPs. To make the most of out of meta descriptions, keep them within 160 characters and make sure they are catchy enough to get users to click to your website.   
  3. Keywords – The meta keywords tag contains all the keywords used in your site. However, the keyword tags will not necessarily help you rank in SERPs. They can, however, help search engines match the keywords with the visible text on your site.   
  4. Social meta tags - According to Kissmetrics, Open Graph was introduced by Facebook in 2010 to help website owners improve the performance of their site on social media sites — a major driver of most of the web’s traffic. Open Graph tags allow for control over how some information travels from a third-party website to Facebook (and other social sites) when a page is shared, liked, or commented upon. Other social media sites — including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ — also use such social meta tags.  

The importance of complete and accurate meta descriptions for Open Graph images/copy is very similar to meta descriptions in HTML. This is where you describe what your content is all about, but instead of it showing on a SERP, it shows below the link title on Facebook.  

Recently, Facebook limited the ability to overwrite link metadata to verified publishers in order to curb the rampant spread of inaccurate news by dishonest pages that used to overwrite link metadata — such as headlines, descriptions and images — in Graph API or page composer. They also introduced ‘Domain Verification’ as a mandatory step for publishers to be able to edit the way their content appears on Facebook.  

Why Are Title Tags Important? 

Title tags are displayed on SERPs as the clickable headline for a given result. While they help search engines understand what your page is about, they are also the first thing people will see about your page, so make sure they describe your page as accurately as possible.  

Title tags are featured at the top of a web browser and are helpful in guiding people back to your website when they have many browser tabs open. External websites and social sites display the title tag when you share that page. 

Best practices for creating title tags include the following: 

  • Assign unique titles for each page that specifically describes the content within that page. This helps search engines understand that your content is unique. Plus, this will also drive higher click-through rates. 
  • You want to use keywords in your tag but don't stuff them randomly. The tag should make sense to the reader otherwise Google may choose to simply rewrite it.  
  • Research suggests that keywords closer to the beginning of your title tag may have more impact on search rankings so put important keywords first.  
  • Keep your titles under 60-70 characters in length.  
  • You should write your titles in a way that they attract people, not just search engines.  

What are Dead Links? 

A dead link is a critical issue that may cause visitors to leave your website, never to return. When a user clicks on it, they will see a 404 error page, or in other words, a page that just doesn’t exist anymore.  

These pesky ’404 Not Found’ errors aren’t just irritating for users: they hurt your SEO. If search engines detect dead links (aka broken links), they may assume that the site is no longer being updated. Additionally, this may lead to site-wide penalties. 

Dead links have a few causes, including an incorrect URL, the destination link being removed, the linked page or website being defunct, or a link to a website blocked by a firewall. It is critical that you monitor your site regularly for dead links. There are a host of tools (including Google Analytics) that can help you track dead links on your site.  

So, there you have it — some basic SEO concepts that can change the way your website performs. Watching out for these will help improve your site’s SEO and online reputation. 

Check out part one, learning more about why your website should have a sitemap, and part two, discussing the importance of H1 tags. Part three of the series shares more about security SSL.

Are you using these concepts in your SEO strategy? Not sure how or what to do next? Request a complimentary evaluation using our Digital Footprint SEO Audit tool! Our summary is a great place to start when beginning to look deeper at your SEO strategy.

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