Everything About Metadata and Its Impact to SEO

There are a lot of elements to search engine optimization. More often than not, we tend to prioritize one aspect over another.

We’ve all heard marketers preach link building to be the most important thing businesses need to look out for.

Sure, your backlink health is an essential factor when it comes to your domain authority. However, with the way Google has continued to become more intelligent each day, you can’t achieve miraculous results by focusing on one aspect of SEO.

You have to build a comprehensive SEO strategy that includes all the different elements of SEO.

One such important part of SEO strategy is the metadata.

In this article, we’ll talk about what is metadata, the most important types of metadata and the best ways to use them.

What Is Metadata?

In simple terms, metadata in SEO is considered every type of data that is visible to crawlers but not the user when he is on the landing page.

What’s the difference between metadata and meta tags?

There isn’t much of a difference between these terms.

Meta tags provide information about a page within the HTML code. This information within the meta tags is known as metadata.

Metadata is the best way for search engines and web crawlers to read your webpage, which is why it’s so crucial for SEO.

Search engines make use of metadata to understand the information included within your web page and who it is intended for.

Now that we understand what is metadata, let’s discuss the different types of metadata that are critical for SEO.

What Metadata Is Essential for Search Engines?

When it comes to metadata, there are a ton of meta tags that are used on a page. However, we’re only going to focus on the most critical metadata today.

1. Meta title

The meta title is the clickable element that appears on the SERPs and provides a comprehensive idea of what your web page is about.

Your meta title is the first thing that users notice; therefore, it significantly impacts your traffic and click-through rate.

It has been a critical ranking factor for Google over the years. However, with the way Google has become smarter about analyzing user intent, it doesn’t have as much importance any more.

For example, here are the top five meta titles in the SERPs for “How to run a Facebook campaign.”

You can see that none of the top five results on SERPs exactly match the search query!

However, none of the results is irrelevant to the search query — all the results explain how to run a Facebook campaign.

Therefore, this shows how much Google has evolved to prioritize the content of the page as a whole instead of just the meta title.

Here are a few things you should keep in mind while developing meta titles:

• Be unique. Ensure that you create a unique meta title for each web page. Creating a meta title that is click-worthy, not clickbait, is essential.

• Character Limit. Keep your meta titles under 60 characters. As you can see from the screenshot above, search engines shorten long web titles to around 600 to 700px.

• Focus Keyword. Try to keep your focus keyword as close to the beginning of the meta title as naturally possible. Prioritize user experience over search engines when it comes to the placement of your primary keyword.

• Brand name. It’s a good idea to include your brand’s name at the end of your meta title, even if it may not be visible on SERPs.

2. Meta description

If you’re a good SEO who wants to focus on conversion and not just ranking for trophy phrases, then you should focus on the most critical meta tag — the meta description.

The meta description helps businesses provide an overview of what a web page is about.

It appears as a short snippet under the title tag to provide more context to your meta title. Therefore, your meta description should always be an extension of your meta title and work towards improving your click-through rate.

A compelling meta description that closely relates to a search term can also encourage Google to showcase the description within the featured snippets section of SERPs. The meta description is a meta tag that Google understands and prioritizes highly.

Here are a few things you should keep in mind while creating meta descriptions:

• Character Limit. Don’t show your storytelling skills here. Always keep your meta descriptions under 160 characters; otherwise, Google will cut it down for you.

• Users. Don’t just focus on stuffing your meta description with keywords. Instead, create a meta description while keeping your users in the forefront of your mind.

• Search intent. Think about the search intent while crafting your meta description. If you’re not sure, do a simple google search of your keyword and browse through the meta description of the top-ranking web pages. Taking inspiration from these results is the smartest way to create highly optimized meta descriptions.

• Active voice. As a general rule of thumb, prioritize active voice over passive voice. This is because it talks directly to the user and entices them to click through.

• Multiple meta descriptions. You may have plugins installed to include meta tags within web pages. However, it’s important to note that multiple meta descriptions for a single web page can confuse the search engine.

3. Image metadata

What is image metadata? The image alt metadata is added to the image tag to provide information about the contents of the image.

Why do you need image metadata? 

• If the images on your web page don’t get loaded for some reason, the image metadata can give context to the user about the image.

• Search engines aren’t advanced enough to crawl images and understand the content (yet). Image alt attributes help search engines gain an understanding of the image content.

• If someone visually impaired lands on your web page, your image alt text is how they know about any images you’ve included on the page.

Image metadata is also crucial if you want to rank on Google images. Therefore, you should include your keywords within the image metadata.

The bottom line is that you need to optimize your image metadata for users and search engines.

4. Meta robots

While the meta robots tag doesn’t directly impact your SERPs ranking, it tells search bots and web crawlers if and how they should crawl your pages.

There are four values you can assign to these meta robots tags:

1. Index: It tells the search engine to index a web page.

2. Noindex: It tells the search engine to not index a web page.

3. Follow: It tells the search engine to crawl the links on the web page. Furthermore, assigning a dofollow tag to any link tells bots that you vouch for whosoever you’re linking to.

4. Nofollow: It’s just the opposite of the follow value. So it tells search engines to not crawl the links on the web page and that none of the endorsements is implied.

Maybe you want some web pages to not rank on Google. Perhaps it’s a particular offer page that people can only access via a direct link. Or if you have a thin web page with little to no content/value.

In this case, you can use the NoIndex meta tag to keep it out of the SERPs.

It’s vital to ensure you discard web pages you no longer need. Otherwise, they’ll simply take up your crawl budget, and web pages you want to rank on Google won’t get indexed.

Also, take special care not to mistakenly restrict critical pages from being indexed.

Final Thoughts

One of the first things you encounter when you start learning about the world of SEO and ranking on search engines is metadata.

There are so many tiny elements associated with metadata that it may be tempting to simply neglect them thinking they won’t really make much of a difference.

However, these minor tweaks can pile up to become a significant part of the big picture.

While metadata may not be critical to your SERPs ranking, it helps search engines understand your web pages better and improves your user experience.

Therefore, keeping note of metadata while creating your on-page SEO strategy is critical.

If you’re a business that doesn’t have the time to worry about these small aspects of SEO, we can help you. From Technical SEO to these tiny aspects of SEO, we can help you build an SEO campaign that will generate inbound revenue 24-7-365.

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Don’t bother yourself too much about metadata for SEO, we’re always here to help!