You put in your consistent efforts to get linked keywords. All your years of hard work can vanish in a moment if you don’t resolve the SEO issues in time. The majority of these issues can appear minor in the beginning.
Many of you might think that meta tags aren’t that important. And your query is quite natural. But, meta tags play a crucial role in an SEO strategy. You can check for yourself whether meta tags are essential or not by referring to this SEO audit report.
Now that you are starting to get concerned about every factor that isn’t alright with your meta tags let me guide you on the most common meta issues and their fixes.
Meta Tags: What are they?
Meta tags are brief snippets of about 150-160 characters that provide a summary of what the whole page is all about. The snippet is enclosed in HTML tags and recommends that search engines, like Chrome, regarding the content, be displayed on the search results page after the link heading. Meta tags aren’t visible on the page. Instead, they are present in the source code of the page. There’s just one difference between tags visible to you and tags you aren’t able to see is location: meta tags are present in HTML only, generally at the “head” of the page, and thus are visible just to search engines. As the name implies, “meta” refers to “metadata,” which is data about the content of your page provided by these tags. Thus, now you are aware of the importance of optimizing meta tags for traffic tactics.
Meta description
Some common meta description issues and their fixes
Missing description.
The search engine may automatically create a meta description if your site lacks a meta description. And you probably won’t be pleased by it, so take charge while you still can.
Solution:
The issue can be avoided by taking an SEO audit.
Too lengthy or too small
If your meta description is too big or too small, the chances of getting more links are lower. Even though there is no challenge on the length of a meta description, it is usually suggested to limit the description to 150-166 characters to avoid cutting content.
Multiple meta descriptions on a single page.
1+ meta description tags on one page can confuse the search results. Also, duplicate meta descriptions on various pages may appear spammy or untrustworthy.
Keyword Ignorance
Keywords are a crucial part of a compelling meta description. Keywords matching the user’s search content are displayed in bold. This would help in increasing the click-through rates of your website. Not including keywords in the meta description can lead to fewer possibilities of high click-through rates.
Solution:
Optimize your description – by referring to the audit report by Web Help Agency.
Common practices
Usage of active voice in your meta description. The usage of active voice assists in making the description brief and easily understandable.
Be careful with the words you choose. The users should be able to point out their gains from visiting your website, giving them a reason for visiting your site.
A clickable link like “Click here to learn more” conveys the next step to users and tempts them to visit your site.
Meta robot attributes
Meta robots tags suggest to the search engine whether and how they must approach your site.
Some everyday meta robots issues and their fixes
Noindex pages are blocked by robots.txt
Due to this, the search engine cannot view the noindex robots tag, which might still index the page. Solution: The above issue can be checked in the Coverage report in the console. For finding indexed pages that might be set to noindex, select the “Valid with warnings” tab and search for “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt” warnings.
False meta noindex.
This prevents Google from indexing the page, so it’ll get no organic traffic. Solution: Select the “Excluded” tab and find the pages “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag”:
False nofollow attribute
This can prevent Google from discovering the links on the page, thus preventing the discovery and indexing of essential content. Solution: For finding pages with rogue nofollow attributes, visit the website with Web Help Agency’s Audit and check the Indexability report for “Nofollow page” warnings.
Meta viewport
Meta viewport tags specify the page’s visible area. This guides the browser on how the page should be seen on different devices (like tab/mobile/desktop).
Some everyday meta robots issues and their fixes
Most modern CMSs and themes set the viewport automatically, so tag issues are rare. Such issues can be seen with the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console, and mobile usability issues are here. So, a “Viewport not set” error will be seen if there is a partial reason for this problem.
Solution: This can be fixed by including an appropriate meta viewport tag on the pages.
Best practices
- Using meta viewport tags on all your site pages
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve discussed some common meta-issues in SEO and how to tackle them. In conclusion, meta tags are crucial factors in a successful SEO plan. You are ready to spot meta issues and fix them efficiently. For further, do drop by the query section. We would be happy to address your queries. Regarding more information regarding meta issues, do check our audit report service.
FAQs
<strong>Are meta tags important?</strong>
In the beginning, you may not get its importance. But as you encounter some issues, you will start realizing their importance. Meta tags are essential aspects of a good SEO plan; thus, we figured out usually faced meta issues.
<strong>How to include the Meta Viewport attribute on my webpage?</strong>
Just paste<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″> in the <head> part of your page.
