Metadata is utilized to give more information about your site and what it entails to search engines and their users. It offers extensive details about your site to search engines and website visitors who encounter your site when they search for something relative to it. Metadata can also be optimized to increase and expand the elements of your content and what allows it to stand out on the results page. Be sure to keep reading to discover all of the important factors of metadata.
What Does Metadata Tell Google?
Metadata is able to signify to Google which of your site’s pages are relative to certain keyword phrases. If you have unique content on your pages, and your metadata supports this, Google is likely going to rank your site’s pages higher for the users to find. This is helpful as the searchers grasp an understanding of what your site entails in relation to their search, as well as being easy to navigate. Google determines your rank based on all of these contributing factors. So if you’re looking to rank higher, or you’d like to expand upon what your site has to offer, be sure to put this into the metadata so that Google can understand.
What Kind Of Metadata Can Optimize My Website?
When it comes to boosting your metadata, some of the things that you should optimize are your page titles, meta descriptions, robots txt, alt text, canonical tags, and h-tags.
Page titles are the very first thing that users see when they land upon the search engine results page; otherwise referred to as SERP. The page title is what becomes the blue text on the SERP page. Your page title should include your website’s name, a brief description of your page, and if you can include a location it would not hurt. The goal here is to keep your character limit to 60 or less.
Meta descriptions are located directly below the page title on the SERP. This is the short blurb about what your page entails. Similar to page titles, meta descriptions should be 160 characters or less. These descriptions should include the areas served, contact information, and a short description of what this page offers for its users.
Robots txt is used to prevent a search engine from indexing individual pages. Indexing is how you tell Google to not display a certain page on the SERP.
Alt-text is included on images and contains a brief description with keywords explaining what your image entails.
Canonical tags can be used to prioritize certain pages, especially if you have two on your site that are similar. This can be used to display the page of your choice on the SERP.
Lastly, an h-tag is a header tag, which is used to structure your page. Similar to page titles, you want your h-tags to be descriptive and brief. The order of the header tags highlights the importance of each section. Beginning with H1, which typically denotes a page title or article headline, and ending with H6 which serves more as a subheading to break up your page content.
Contact Us
If you’re looking for more information regarding the optimization of metadata, we are here to help. Contact us today at Boston Web Marketing to get started on increasing your SEO strategies. You can give us a call at 857-526-0096 or send us an email at sales@getfoundquick.com.