Google defines metadata as “a set of data that describes and gives information about other data”. Which for some reason does not process in my mind at all. It’s basically not saying anything all.
Rather than trying to define metadata, I’d rather explain what it does.
Metadata exists on every single page, on every single website that has ever existed. It’s built of various metatags which helps Google understand your website better.
There are loads of different meta tags, some of which are now outdated and you don’t need to worry about.
First, let’s look at what metadata you need to be using.
Meta Titles
Meta titles are a direct ranking factor so it is essential that you complete that section. They need to clearly encapsulate the content of its page and be between 50 and 60 characters long, including spaces.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are not a direct ranking factor, however, it is the first thing a new reader sees on the search engine results page. So that makes it your best chance to sell your page to new readers.
This needs to be between 150 – 160 characters.
Check out my in-depth guide to writing meta titles and descriptions
Meta Viewport
The Meta viewport tag is a bit of code you can change in the <head> of your blog. It allows your site to render on different device screens. In the current mobile world, it’s important that you have this tag set up correctly.
The standard set up is:
<meta name=viewport content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>
You’ll only need to set this the one time.
Meta Content Type
As a blogger, you’ll likely never come across this tag. This is something that developers tend to factor in when they are building websites (and WordPress themes).
This tag is necessary to declare your character set for the page and needs to be on every page. Leaving it out would impact how your page renders.
Below is an example of who the tag looks:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
Robots
Robots refers to indexing and link following, if you don’t specify a meta robots tag, they read that automatically set as index,follow. Which means that search engines will find and index the page then follow any internal links.
It’s only if you want to change one of those two commands that you need to add meta robots. Only change what you want to be different from the norm.
Therefore, if you want to noindex but follow the links on the page, you would need to add the following:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />
Social Media tags
This is something you likely don’t need to think about these days, as there are loads of WordPress plugins which sort this for you.
If this is something you want to manually, Moz have a really handy post on Social Media meta tags
Now, let’s move on to the less relevant meta tags
Meta Keywords
Meta keywords we’re invisible to the reader and told Google precisely what words you are targeting. That made it so easy to rank on Google, you could literally set what keywords you wanted to rank for. There was a lot less going off online and that made it all that much easier to rank.
With meta keywords making it so easy to rank, it quickly started to get abused by those with sneaky SEO tactics.
In 2009, Google (and other search engines) announced they would no longer be looking at that feature when they are crawling.
Author/web author
This tag is used to name the author of the page.
Expiration/date
“Expiration” is used to note when the page expires, and “date” is the date the page was made. Are any of your pages going to expire? I doubt it.
Refresh
This is a dodgy version of a redirect and should not be used, if at all possible. You should always use a 301 redirect.
There are loads more, but the likelihood of you coming across them is so slim these days.