By Alex Darling

When we do on-page SEO optimizations for our clients, we look at two big places changes can be made. There is the data on the page – what people see and interact with normally, and the ‘hidden’ data, called metadata, which describes the page without directly displaying anything to the users.

On-page data is like the Wild West for search engines. The content on your page can go wherever you want. You can make text change colors and put pictures in the background. You can organize text into paragraphs or tabs. All of those aesthetic changes look great to humans, but they can be hard for search engines to understand. Google is pretty good at reading pages as if it were a person, but in some cases it would rather have some structure. That’s where metadata comes in. On-page metadata is information about your page that isn’t displayed, and it is subject to tighter restrictions in terms of formatting. Here we’ll talk about how on-page metadata is used for SEO.

Title

The word ‘title’ probably makes you think of something like this:

But that’s not we’re talking about. In the context of SEO, the “title” is actually text wrapped in the HTML tags <title></title>. You usually can’t see the title of a page without special tricks, though your browser may display the page title in its tabs and Google will display page titles in their search results.

The title of your page does a handful of important things:

1. It describes your webpage to search engines in an extremely concise way
2. It describes your webpage to users who find you through a search engine
3. It describes your webpage to users who look at links via social media

Those three uses will dictate your strategy when writing title tags. You want add keywords that let Google know what your webpage is about, but you also want people to click on the search results. For informational pages on client sites (more likely to be found through organic search), we are more aggressive about proper use of keywords. For blog posts (more likely to be found through social media) we are more likely to use a catchy or informational title.

HTML best practices state that titles are technically required, and there’s a good chance every page on your website has a title on it. According to Google, title tags are not required, but the title tag is one of the easiest things to optimize on your site and it definitely can make a difference!

Meta Description

Meta descriptions are the second most common areas on your site to optimize. If you’ve ever heard someone say “titles and metas” or “optimize your metas”, this is probably what they’re referring to. Meta descriptions are written as <meta name=”description” content=”YOUR META DESCRIPTION HERE”>. Meta descriptions have two important uses:

• It may be used to describe your webpage to users who find you through a search engine
• It describes your webpage to users who look at links via social media, unless another piece of metadata supersedes it (see below)

The most important thing to note here is that meta descriptions are not directly used to rank your content. Every meta description on your site could be the lyrics to God’s Gonna Cut You Down and Google would treat you the same. But imagine if you searched for “content marketing,” which of these two options would you trust more?

Most searchers are more likely to take the first option (no offense, Mr. Cash). The words “content” and “marketing” get bolded and the text provides some pertinent information. Good meta descriptions are supposed to encourage people to click those links they see on Google / Facebook / Twitter.

Typically your meta description will be nestled among 9 other search results from competing websites. Your available real estate will also be much smaller (around 150-160 characters). When we write meta descriptions at ChoiceLocal, we try to include keywords a user might search, and some useful information or a call to action.

Open Graph Metadata

Unlike titles and meta descriptions, open graph metadata isn’t just one tag. It’s a handful of different tags written as <meta property=”og:TAG_NAME” content=”TAG_CONTENT”>. These are specifically for social media – Google+, Facebook, and Twitter all use them. Some of the important ones are:

• og:image – The featured image you want to display
• og:title – The title you want. This can’t replace the contents of your <title> tag in search engine results
• og:description – The description you want. This can’t replace your meta description in search engine results

Open graph metadata doesn’t have a direct effect on your rankings.

Twitter Metadata

Twitter metadata is very similar to open graph metadata, except it’s only for Twitter. You specify these with <meta property=”twitter:TAG_NAME” content=”TAG_CONTENT”>.

Chances are you low you’ll need to use this and Twitter metadata doesn’t have a direct effect on your rankings.

Meta Keywords

This is one of the first pieces of on-page metadata that Google recognized. Back when Google was naïve and trustworthy, they used keywords as a ranking factor. Conniving search engine marketers then stuffed every webpage full of possible keywords, so Google pulled the plug. To this day, the meta keywords tag is not used in any way for SEO – it doesn’t show up on social media, it doesn’t show up in search results, and it’s not a ranking factor.

Meta Robots

The meta robots tag is a very simple tag, but it’s also liable to cause the most accidents. It looks like this:

<meta property=”robots” content=”INSTRUCTIONS_HERE”>

There are only two instructions you can put in a meta robots tag: NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW. NOINDEX asks search engines not to display your webpage in search results, and NOFOLLOW asks search engines not to look at the links on your webpage. 99% of the time you don’t want to touch this at all. If either of those instructions is accidentally sent to Google, your search engine rankings (and traffic) could get ugly. Be careful!

Rel-Canonical

This is a piece of metadata hidden in a weird spot. Whereas most on-page metadata declares itself in a meta tag, rel-canonicals are written as <link rel=”canonical” href=”CANONICAL_URL”>. The rel-canonical indicates to a search engine what the original (or “canonical”) version of a page is. This is most pertinent when it comes to duplicate content. If a search engine looks at your website and notices several pages are exactly the same as some other site, it might suspect foul play. Google is most well-known for assigning ranking penalties to people it considers cheaters. A penalty on your site means fewer visitors and a worse bottom line. With a rel-canonical link, you can avoid Google’s wrath and give credit where it’s due.

Schema

There is one more major piece of on-page metadata called Schema. However, it deserves a dedicated blog post. I’ll save that for later. For now, here’s an example of what ChoiceLocal’s on-page Schema should look like.

Thanks for reading. Do you have any questions about on-page metadata? Any other insights you’d like to share? Let us know!

About the Author

Alex Darling is a digital marketing specialist. His specialties include technical SEO and process automation. He likes singing, playing board games, and spending an unhealthy amount of time on reddit.