Sean Si is a blogger, entrepreneur, SEO specialist, public speaker, and inbound marketer. Listen to his podcast on Spotify, read his personal blog, or sign up for his SEO class now.
One of the most basic aspects of content writing is crafting the perfect meta tag to go with it. In an earlier post, we discussed that meta tags are one of the most basic elements of SEO and that they have been around for a really long time. A lot of people feel that meta tags are complicated and some might even argue an altogether different language like computer code.
Quick Answer: Robots meta tags are pieces of code that instruct search engine robots. These HTML snippets tell them what they can and cannot do on your page. It’s a way of controlling how your pages are crawled and indexed, and how your content is displayed in the SERPs.
In my previous post ‘What search engine crawlers do with your Meta tags’, I talked about it’s depreciating usage. It’s not as powerful and useful as it once was. Some say that it’s still handy and some say otherwise. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how SEO experts nowadays use Meta tags for their websites.
Meta tags are words in your code which users will not be able to see. It’s effect on SEO has become less and less over the years due to the abuse of webmasters in stuffing keywords inside the meta tags. It used to affect rankings, now it doesn’t. It used to be a factor in the retrieval of the indexed site, now only 2 search engines are left practicing that. But SEO experts, according to Danny Sullivan still do use it for things we might not have been able to think of. So how does SEO experts use Meta tags?
We all know that our meta tags get crawled and indexed due to the fact that it comes out on the snippets and several other reasons. But we’ve also heard that it doesn’t have any weight on page rankings. So how does it work? How does a search engine treat the meta tags in your webpage? What does search engines do with your meta tags?
Meta tags are codes in your website’s <head> portion. They are invisible to the users and are by far, the only legal way to have unseen keywords in your website. Don’t you ever wonder what search engines do with your meta tags since we know that it doesn’t affect page ranking anymore? I know I do. So I read some articles about it and found out from Search Engine Land what exactly your meta tags is being used for by the search engine crawlers.
There are three things that a search engine crawler does with your meta tags:
Meta Tags have been one of the most basic elements of SEO. It is a must to know for every SEO practitioner. Are meta tags a factor in Google page rank? Is it important? What effect does it have on your site’s SEO?
Meta tags have been around since… Since I can remember. They have been a big part in search engine history. They were valued as a factor in rankings before – until people started abusing their use in getting on top of the SERPs. After that, Google opted for meta tags out of the ranking factors. But that doesn’t mean they’re not important anymore. Meta tags still play quite a big role in your site’s SEO.
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