The following tutorial details which meta tags are paramount when performing SEO alongside your keywords.

HTML meta tags and meta tags are very similar and serve the same purpose – to provide search engines with information about a website. As Google’s ranking is made up of 200 or more components or ‘ranking signals’ these on-page SEO elements are critical to this ranking. Content relevance must therefore be both original and relevant to the search phrase (keyword focus) to rank well as well as optimising meta titles, descriptions, headers, image alt & URLs.

Clean and meaningful on-page optimisation is necessary for every website to realise its full potential in SEO. One of the reasons why many authority sites no longer dominate the top organic listing is that they neglect basic on-page SEO.

The focus of your keywords, content and subsequent metas should be aimed at the audience group that contributes to the success of your business. Develop this by outlining what your target customer is thinking during their buyer journey. This includes their Awareness stage (inspiration pain points), Consideration stage (research-comparison)and Decision (purchase-advocacy).

Implement these insights within the following metas outlined below to ensure your website pages are well structured, your keywords are specific and signals are being sent to Google in the right manner.

1. Keyword relevancy to back-end metas

Content within your pages, metas and keywords go hand in hand; they are the foundations of your website, define your content and help search engines and users understand the purpose of your pages. Create content around your keyword research, update the metas, add structured data and enhance your presence on search.

2. Specify your webpages titles

Meta titles tags are a vital part of SEO, social sharing and UX. Writing them effectively is a very low effort, high-impact SEO task. Your first job is to think about the entire user experience and attract clicks (keywords research) from well-targeted visitors who are likely to find your content valuable.

3. Meta title optimisation tips

Ensure that your title is an accurate and concise description of the page’s content, conveying the most positive message possible. Make every page title unique, with relevancy to the landing page content. Make sure to put your primary keyword first for UX & search engines). Also add a CTA (call to action) this is proven to offer a lift in clicks.

4. Set expectations with meta descriptions

Meta descriptions describe the content of a webpage to your searchers, while simultaneously convincing and persuading them to click through to your page. Descriptions may not directly influence the search engine algorithm, but click-through rates do, as Google is actively measuring and factoring in user behaviour when it comes to results.

5. Meta description CTR tips

Every word in your meta description matters, so make the most of them. Use 150 characters maximum. Connect with your target audience by using relevant language that will appeal to them – make it compelling. Encourage the click with a clear CTA and indication of what to expect when clicking (features/benefits).

6. Alternative text for images

First and foremost, image alts are a principle of web accessibility (helping visually impaired users). They also have a huge SEO benefit, providing better image context/descriptions to search engines crawlers and helping them to index an image properly. Image descriptions give you more SEO weight for your targeted keyword.

7. Image alt optimisation tips

Use your keyword: alt text provides another opportunity to include your target keyword on a page. Keep it relatively short: the most popular screen readers cut off alt text at around 125 characters. Along with implementing image alt text, ensure the image file save names follow naming best practice.

8. Improve UX with header tags

Although it’s not a major search engine ranking factor, heading do affect SEO. That’s because heading (header hierarchy) are important to help users understand the subject of an article, and if readers use heading to figure out what an article is about, search engines such as Google will too.

9. Improve header hierarchy tips

The H1 heading should describe a page’s main topic, be highly related to the content and unique across your website. There is no minimum H1 length. Only use one H1 and introduce your primary keywords. Spread the rest across H2-H6.Other headings can be used multiple times (follow a hierarchical structure).

10. Open Graph social meta tags

Open Graph meta tags are there to help promote positive integration between social platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and website URLs you share in these platforms. Ensuring you have this meta correctly implemented alongside your keyword focus can help improve engagement (sharing to your website.

11. Canonicalisation & duplication

Avoid duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a webpage with a canonical meta tag. Do this by adding a HTML link tag with a ‘rel=canonical’ attribute on single –page URLs that have the same content and keyword focus with other URLs <link rel”canonical” href=http://example.com/ />

12. Robots – to index or no index

Help search engines crawlers do their job of crawling and indexing your keyword-focus webpages by implementing the robot meta ta. It has four main values for search engine crawlers, providing them with instructions on whether to index or no-index your webpages.

13. Tips on the for main values

NOFOLLOW: search engine crawlers will not follow the page and any links in that page.

NOINDEX: they will not index that page.

FOLLOW: they will follow all the links in that page.

INDEX: they will index the whole page.

14. Relevancy in other sources

Keyword and meta relevancy are prevalent in other sources, for example targeted paid campaigns (PPC). Bidding on the right keywords and search queries that trigger your ad map back to your keyword research, as well as ensuring its best positioning and CPC (cost per click) through meta relevancy and quality scores.

15. Quality Score keyword tips

The closer the connection between the keyword and ad copy, the higher the keyword relevance. Ensure the primary keywords are in the ad copy – incorporate these into the headline, body and display URL if possible. Also, maximise the keyword relevancy within your metas, URL header hierarchy and content.

16. URLs

Working alongside your meta data and keyword implementation, URL structures help search engines to understand the relative importance (keyword weight) of each webpage. It’s also helpful from an anchor text perspective, as people e are more likely to link with the relevant keyword or phrase that’s included within the URL.