What is metadata for SEO?
Have you ever wondered why when you search for something and the exact or almost identical search query is typically inside the title or text underneath the URL? Well, that is all because of SEO rankings! Yup, another factor of SEO is called metadata and this data is another step in SEO.
Once the research and competitor analysis is done, an SEO expert Denver will go through and optimize the specific landing pages that are being targeted.
Here’s what metadata includes!
Metadata
Metadata is all the information about a page that is sent to SERPs to help this specific page to start ranking! Metadata is critical for a website to start ranking in search engines, and because of this, all companies should have metadata on their pages for ranking purposes!
Meta tags
WordStream defines meta tags as, “snippets of text that describes a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s source code. Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.”
Meta tags are different than the title and description because these tags only exist within the HTML of a website or blog post. The goal of meta tags is to tell the search engine not only what the page itself is about, but to help organic SEO ranking overtime.
There are four different types of meta tags that an SEO expert Denver can work on to improve a website’s overall ranking in search engines.
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Meta keywords attribute
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Title tag
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Meta description attribute
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Meta robots attribute
The most important meta tags out there are the title tags. The best title tags will begin with the best and targeted keyword through keyword research conducted for that specific page. For example, if a company wants their service page for SEO to rank, they could add SEO expert Denver based on the opportunities for this keyword.
From there, meta description and meta title fall under this category but are visible to searchers!
Meta title
Moz defines meta title as, “title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine result pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result, and are important for usability, SEO and social sharing.”
When someone types in a search query such as “best law firms in Denver” a searcher might notice that the first ranking search queries all have the text similar to “best law firms in Denver.” It can vary between Denver, Colorado or Colorado itself, but those are meta titles aka title tags.
A title tag should be about 50-60 characters long and is displayed once you click into the web browser itself! Yeah, those are keywords that a SEO expert Denver put in place to help that website rank for that specific keyword phrase.
Now, from there, see the text underneath that example, that is what we call the meta description!
Meta description
Moz defines meta description as, “an HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of a web page. Search engines such as Google often display the meta description in search results, which can influence click-through rates.” The text that is underneath a URL or heading is where the meta description is located.
Now, the thing with meta description is, you do not always need one. Hold up, let us explain. This is all dependent on the overall strategy behind SEO. If there is not a meta description provided, Google will pull those first 50-60 characters from the page itself. If the page is optimized, you might not need the description. Another scenario of not needing a description would be if the page is pretty much self-explanatory.
Wow, did not know there was this layer of SEO! Yeah, SEO can get into the weeds as well like to describe it with all of the different ways you can optimize a page or website! For help with SEO or a free consultant to see where your site is at, give us a call today!