How To Optimise Your Meta Elements

Optimising your metadata for search performance

For any business looking to provide a boost to their online traffic, onsite SEO should be your first port of call. However, before you can take your strategy to the next level, you need to make sure you’ve mastered the basics – and your website’s meta elements are a fundamental pillar you can’t leave for later.

Meta elements, your meta title (or page title), meta description and headings, are crucial for achieving success on the web, providing essential information to search engines and users alike, helping them to understand your content and how it relates to their search queries.

In this guide, we’ll take you through the basics of meta elements, and how to optimise them for improved SEO performance.

What is Metadata?

Before we go into detail about optimising meta elements, it is important to understand what they are, and what they are used for. Simply put, a meta element is a tag that provides data about a web page. Some meta elements may be visible (on the page or sometimes just in the search engine results, whilst others are hidden and utilised mainly by search engine crawlers.

There are a few meta elements you’re likely to come across when optimising your website, but the most common are as follows:

• Title Tags: Title tags (often called your page title or meta title) are one of the most critical meta elements you need to think about optimising, as they are very prominently displayed in search engine results pages as a clickable headline. As such considerable weight is given to the words and phrases contained within your title. The title tag will also appear in the web browser tab when a user visits the page, but this is often an unnoticed feature and disappears almost completely for users on mobile and tablet devices.

   The title tag should be concise, yet descriptive, and contain your most important keywords ‘with prominence’, letting both search engines and your users know exactly what your page is about.

   This is not the same as the H1, header or title of your page. The H1 tag is different, and while not officially metadata, it is an important way to help crawlers deduce what your content is about and its structure.

• Meta Descriptions: The meta description allows you to go into a little more detail about the content of your page. Like the title tag, the meta description will appear in search engine results, and while it’s not a direct ranking factor, a well-written meta description can help lure users to your page and improve overall traffic.You should include relevant keywords and related variations here too, though you have only a little more room to elaborate.It’s often a good idea to include a call to action or highlight your USPs (unique selling points) here as the meta description plays a key role in conversion and boosting CTRs (click through rates)

• Robots Meta Tags: Your robots meta tags provide instructions to search engine crawlers on how to index and follow links on your pages. This can be extremely useful, letting crawlers know which pages should and shouldn’t be indexed and which links you might not want them to follow.
• Canonical Tags: Like your robots meta tags, canonical tags provide instructions to search engine bots, allowing you to indicate the preferred version of a web page if multiple pages on your site have very similar or even duplicated content.In general, duplicated content is considered detrimental for SEO, and canonical tags can help prevent content duplication issues that may affect rankings.
• Viewport Meta Tag: Increasingly more users are using a range of devices to explore the web, from their smartphones to widescreen desktops. The viewport meta tag is essential for responsive web design and mobile optimisation, ensuring that your website is displayed correctly across various screen sizes.
• Meta Keywords: Meta keywords used to be a way for SEO specialists to indicate the primary keywords of a page, but Google no longer considers them a ranking factor due to misuse. Whilst you can still make use of meta keywords, they aren’t as important as they used to be and can send a spammy signal if used incorrectly, so it’s better to focus on other meta elements as part of your on-page optimisation efforts.
• Other Meta Tags: Some specialised meta tags cater to specific purposes, such as Open Graph tags for social media sharing. Whilst we won’t be going into detail on all the different types of meta tags you may encounter here, it’s important to be aware that there are plenty outside of those mentioned in this article. Google provides some helpful information on what kinds of meta tags it supports, which is worth checking out.

Why is metadata optimisation important for SEO?

Metadata optimisation plays a pivotal role in enhancing the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. At its core, metadata serves as a crucial communication bridge between your web content and search engines, conveying vital information about the nature of your page. One of its primary functions is to emphasise the themes that are central to your content, essentially telling search engines what your page is all about. This, in turn, aids search engines in grasping the context and relevance of your content within the vast landscape of the internet.

Moreover, metadata optimisation goes beyond mere keyword emphasis; it also works in tandem with your page’s content to reinforce its topical relevance. By aligning the metadata with the core themes and subject matter of your content, you provide a coherent and cohesive user experience.

In essence, metadata optimisation ensures that your content isn’t just discovered by search engines but also understood and appreciated within the broader context of online information. Consequently, when executed effectively, metadata optimisation can significantly boost your SEO efforts and drive more organic traffic to your website.

How to Create an Effective Strategy for Optimising Your Metadata

When it comes to title tags, brevity is key. Whilst you are able to set longer or shorter title tags, search engines will truncate them in the SERPs if they exceed a length of 600 pixels (this is usually around 55-60 characters, but be aware that some letters contain more pixels than others- think MMM vs III).

On the other extreme, it is difficult for shorter title tags to convey what the page is about effectively. If Google deems the title tag or meta description doesn’t give an accurate depiction of the content, it will write its own by sampling the content. The sweet spot is generally around 45-50 characters.

When it comes to keywords, adding them to your title tag should be a top priority. However, as with your overall content strategy, you need to incorporate them in a natural-sounding way rather than stuffing your title tag with a stream of keywords.

For example, the title tag for this page is “How to Optimise Your Meta Elements – A Fundamental SEO Skill”. This contains our core keywords of “meta elements”, as well as “SEO”, and will perform better in searches than something like “Meta Elements | Optimise Meta Elements | Meta Elements SEO. or “Yet another blog | Bespoke Digital”

As with everything, prioritise the user over the search engine algorithms, and remember search engines have measures in place to detect the use of unnatural language.

Above all else, remember to stay on topic. Your title tag needs to accurately reflect the content on your page and set the expectations as to what information users will find when they click on it. This will help you climb the rankings and improve overall user engagement.

For meta descriptions, the advice doesn’t vary much. You still need to stick within the character limit (for meta descriptions, this is around 150-160 characters), however, write primarily for the human eye, and make sure your description communicates the value and relevance of your content. This isn’t a ranking factor, but it is an important way to encourage traffic to your site over your competitors.

However, as meta descriptions are a little longer, you have more room to get creative and craft something compelling enough that your users will visit your website over your competitors.

Think about the reason why they made the search that they did – what problem are they trying to fix, or question are they trying to answer? Use this to directly address their pain point and demonstrate how your page best solves their issue. Keep your language and keyword distribution natural, and you’re setting yourself up for SEO success.

Analysing Your Optimisation

Once you’ve gone through your website and set all your title tags and meta descriptions to your liking, it can be tempting to leave them in place for years to come. However, remember that your meta elements need not be set in stone – in fact, you should be experimenting with them!

Make use of analytics tools, including your Search Console performance to determine what is, and isn’t, encouraging traffic to your site and track the performance of your meta element changes and their impact on organic traffic, and make tweaks, try out different variations to see what yields the best click through rates and encourages engagement.

There are a wide variety of other tools you can use to analyse your meta elements, but we recommend the following:

• Yoast: If you use WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin can help you manage metadata page to page. Other CMS, such as Shopify, also offer a way to easily manage your meta elements. Have a look at what your CMS offers.
• Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog provides a simple way to audit your metadata and show you how your pages may appear in Google search results.
• Mangools: Mangools SERP simulator can help you plan your meta elements by showing you how they might appear on Google’s SERPS and where truncation may occur.

Top Tips

• Avoid using meta keywords. This is an outdated practice, and many search engines consider them an indicator of spam content. If you must use them, ensure they are unique and descriptive to each page.
• Avoid stuffing your titles with keywords, and instead opt for something descriptive, readable, and natural.
• Make sure your meta description gives an accurate depiction of the page content, and include USPs and CTAs to increase engagement.
• Consider search intent when writing your meta titles.
• Keep it concise and write for users, not the search engines
• Google won’t always use the page title you supply, it may rewrite them or sample bits of it. The same goes for the meta description, it can be snippets of content from your page if Google thinks this is more relevant to the search query.
• To use fewer pixels in your meta title and meta description, use a bar (|) as a separator, & rather than and, and don’t use an underscore – Google doesn’t like them.

What we can do for you

Optimising your meta elements is a small, yet crucial change you can make to provide context, improve click-through rates, and influence search engine rankings. By crafting compelling title tags, creating click-worthy meta descriptions, and aligning your meta elements with user intent, you can enhance your website’s discoverability and drive organic traffic. For more help and support with your meta elements, our team would be happy to speak with you.

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