SEO – Understanding Invisible Metadata
SEO Part 2 – Metadata Description
One very beneficial SEO practice has to do with your site’s Metadata.
What is Metadata?
Metadata is information inserted in a specific location on your website.
The job of this data is to boost the visibility of your website in search engines.
More technically:
“A meta description is an HTML tag used to describe the content of a web page. This description will show up below the title and URL of your page as it appears in the search engine results. In order to remain visible within Google, your meta description should be kept somewhere between 140-160 characters.”
https://www.semrush.com/blog/on-page-seo-basics-meta-descriptions/
In this article, you will learn steps to ensure that utilizing the Metadata Descriptions is helping you rank higher.
Knowing how to use the metadata description correctly can lead to your site drawing in a bigger audience and potential buyers for your products. The metadata can position you above your competitors.
The metadata on your website includes your title and all of the information about the pages on your website.
Search engines use this information to understand what the content is about on your site.
The metadata supplies information to search engines on each individual page. This information tells the search engine when the site is crawled by bots if your site is appropriately connected to whatever search terms the audience is using.
When it is, then your site will be displayed as one of the results to whatever the person is trying to find.
The algorithm that search engines such as Google use, determine whether or not the site is of any value.
Using evergreen SEO practices with metadata in place, your site will not become outdated. Without the right metadata, the bots can’t accurately pinpoint a description and your site gets ranked on page 69 or beyond…
Not paying attention to the Metadata Description can cause you to rank lower in search results.
Competing for Traffic
You want to be able to compete for traffic, which means you need to know exactly what search engines like to see from metadata details. (Traffic: attracting the visitors to your website or products. Your competitors are seeking the same traffic. We all want more traffic.)
The first placement for the Meta Description is to pay attention to is meta tags.
Meta tags clue the search engine into what your site is about. These tags are just little bits of information or text that explain what the content is on your site. No one will actually see these tags when they’re on your site because they’re invisible.
Meta tags are located in the source code of your pages.
To see an example of source code and the meta tags, you can go to the home page of any website – whether it’s your own or a well-known one – right-click on the page so that a pop-up box appears.
You’ll see the words “view page source.” When you click on that, it’ll open the code and reveal the invisible metadata. For example, you might see something like: <meta charset=”utf-8″>. (You will also see all the code that makes the site display for the web.)
This metadata lets the browser know that during the coding, it’s set up so that UTF-8 is to be used. This has to do with how the text is made readable. It’s this type of information that matters to search engines.
Every piece of metadata your site has can increase your ranking in search engines. If you don’t know what the metadata in a source code does, simply look some up on a website, copy it, and paste it into a search engine.
When you search the code snippet in a search engine, you get an explanation of what it is and why it’s important. Examples of metadata you want to use because search engines like them are ones like title tags. These are the keywords that you use in your titles.
The Page Description is an important part of your metadata. You can also use headings and subheadings for metadata.
It is important to use metadata in every alt text, as well – Alt Text is alternative text and is used with images on your website for accessibility. Search engines do not read images. By providing keyword-rich alt tags, the content is indexed in the metadata for search engine bots to find.
Alt text explains the image so that the bots can understand it. They tell the bots what is being displayed – most people fail to do this on their blog posts and you will see “image 42” or “sailboat”. Take advantage of the SEO juice provided and use your keywords in the alt text.
Know Metadata Best Practices
Knowing how to use metadata can lead to your site drawing in a bigger audience and potential buyers for your products.
Used carefully, metadata can position you above your competitors.
The 5 tips listed below are key to your visibility success:
- Use Keywords in your title of the page or post
- Set the WordPress URL’s to “permalinks” so that the keyword is in the URL for the article.
- Use a plugin such as Yoast SEO, Google XML sitemap, Rank Math to guide you through the areas that make it SEO friendly.
- Follow the directions in the individual plugin to maximize the metadata on your website.
- Edit the Search Engine Preview
The plugins provide an area for you to write a specific snippet description for the article. This is what the search engine sees and is include as the description in a search. When using an SEO plugin you can edit the description to appear as you would like.
This is the preview currently used for this page.
Join me for SEO Part 3 next week: The Importance of Optimized Keywords.
To your Success!
Terry
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