What are meta tags?
Google surveys millions of websites every day. Meta tags are a summary of the site in as short a format as possible.
The site summary used to be Meta title, Meta description and Meta keywords. As things have got bigger for Google, Bing etc. they look at less and less information.
For example the meta description used to be 160 to 320 characters current trend is to only look up to 160 characters and ignore anything written after that. If there is nothing written as a meta description then Google will simply take a ‘snippet’ from the front page on a site where the front page is mostly images it will grab whatever text it sees, that text might not describe the business at all.
Failing to supply Google with accurate info about your business and ignoring is a mistake as the longer an inaccurate description is in place the deeper it become embedded in Google’s indexing.
Including the title in 2024 you have just 230 characters Title (70 characters) + Description (120-160 characters) including spaces to describe the site. NB Avoid lists, these are read by prospective visitors so should also entice. It’s a bit of an art!
Add to that meta keywords are also included in those characters, though no longer viewed by Google and other search engines it does no harm to include them if you know how via html. The meta keywords no longer appear in most SEO plugins.
If you want to know what your site looks like to google type ‘free meta tag analyser‘ into Google and add your domain name in the box. It will give you what Google sees but remember it might be out of date on the length advised. (See above).
Summary
Meta tags are the way Google will describe your website you have only 230 characters to get it right, Don’t waste them and certainly don’t ignore them!
