Metadata, or meta tags, are little chunks of code within the HTML of a webpage that help give search engine crawlers more information about the content on that page. Although visitors can’t see this code visually on your web pages, metadata is a valuable tool for informing search engines about the purpose of your page and is still an essential part of SEO.
Metadata works alongside the visual content on your page, like the text and images, to help search engines better understand your content. Search engines move at lightning speed through your website, and by providing these meta tags in your code, it can further help solidify your page’s topic to these crawlers. Although search engine crawlers are very smart, adding this metadata makes their jobs easier. Let’s get familiar with a few important kinds of meta tags and their use.
Each post or page on a website has a title tag. You can recognize the title tag on a web page as it is displayed at the top of the browser tab:
Title tags also appear on Google search engine results pages (SERPs). When you search for something on Google and view the results from that search, each web page in that list of results will have its title tag and a few other handy pieces of information:
Title tags are an excellent opportunity to include keywords about your page content. These keywords help search engines better understand your page content, and they can also visually help users recognize your page topic when browsing the search results in Google. You want to make sure that your keywords represent your page content and that your title tag reads naturally.
On your WordPress.com site, the title tag is automatically created by adding the post or page title to the site’s title, separated by a hyphen. For the homepage of your site, the title tag is created by taking the site title and adding it to the site’s description. The site title and/or description can be configured within the General Settings of your site.
Meta descriptions provide a quick summary of your page content. You can see the meta description of a post or page when it shows up in the SERPs:
Although meta descriptions don’t directly influence your organic search rankings, they can heavily influence how many visitors click on your page’s result in the SERPs. A well-written meta description can help describe what your content is about, and entice visitors to click through to it. Google is constantly experimenting with how search results are displayed, and it’s relatively common for Google to re-write the description that shows up for your page in the SERPs, especially if it hasn’t been specifically written. This re-writing even happens for title tags too sometimes.
When editing your page or post for your site on WordPress.com, you can write your meta description in the Excerpt field.
Alternative, or “alt” text, is used to describe the appearance of an image on a post or page. It is an essential part of web accessibility because it provides helpful information for screen readers. In the event that an image on a page has trouble loading, the alt text provided will be displayed in its place.
The best alt text is descriptive but not overly long. An example of alt text for a picture of a slice of pepperoni pizza might be something like this:
<img src="pizza.jpg" alt="pizza">However, a better example would be to make the alt text more descriptive, and have it be like this:
<img src= "pizza.jpg" alt="Young woman eating a slice of pepperoni pizza">
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