Meta tags in testing

Nowadays, there are more than two billion websites on the Internet. Undoubtedly, a user cannot cope with such an amount of information alone, so search engines are here to help. And many tools and algorithms, including meta tags, help websites in search results. 

What are meta tags?

Meta tag is a code fragment that informs search engines about important information about the webpage. It is not shown on the page but in the source code. Meta tags are content descriptors that help search engines inform about the website's content. They also tell how to display the page for users. 

Using meta tags is not necessary, but search engines like Google use them to understand additional information about the website. They can use them for ranking or displaying fragments in the search result, and sometimes they can even ignore meta tags.

Attributes of meta tags

The meta tags' purpose is to describe the content. So these elements are located in the HTML code in the head section, not in the body section  and might include the following attributes:

• name – creates the name for metadata;
• content – the metadata itself;
• the «http-equiv» field – indicates that this metadata is created to work with the browser instead of search engines.

For example:

<meta name="description" content="page description">

<meta name="keywords" content="keywords separated by commas">

<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">

<meta name="author" content="author">

<meta name="copyright" content="copyright">

Popular meta tags

There are dozens of meta tags, but only a few are used more often.

Title tag is text that can be displayed at the top part of the browser. Search engines consider this text as a «title» of the page. These tags do affect search rankings and, no less important, are the only tags that the average user can see. This is especially useful if you give a page one main title for the user but want to clarify or simplify the information for SEO purposes and a user who moves multiple tabs on their desktop. Google does not always show the title tag.

Titles are important for users so they can quickly understand the content of a search query and its relevance. Often it is the main information used for deciding which result to click. Here is why having a high-quality title on web pages is vital.

The title tag looks the following way:

<title> This is the title of the page </title>

To test and assess the effectiveness of this tag, you can use «Google Search Console» as an option. It is worth noting indicators such as clickability (the more clicks, the more attractive the page title is) and the position on the search page. 

Description tag gives us a short description of the web page. These are short paragraphs that inform the user about the page content and allow the search engines to decide whether the content is relevant. Its purpose is simple: it has to make the one searching on Google click on this link. In other words, meta descriptions are necessary to increase conversions from search pages.

<meta name="description" content="Here is the description of the page">

Search systems say that meta description does not provide direct ranking – they do not use it in their ranking algorithm. However Google uses click-through rate (CTR) to determine whether a particular website performs well.

Keywords meta tag describes relevant keywords for the given page. For many years in pursuit of increasing the number of page views, marketers inserted keywords into their code that were completely unrelated to their pages, hoping to intercept traffic from more popular but not thematic pages. This process was called «keyword stuffing». This is why, nowadays, Google does not use meta keywords in its ranking algorithm anymore, all because they are easy to abuse.

In the HTML page code, it looks like this: 

<meta name="keywords" content="keywords separated by commas">

Robots meta tags inform the search engines about what to do with their pages. For example, they tell the systems whether they can display the page in search results or inform browsers whether to follow the links to the next page. 

In the HTML page code, they are shown the following way:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Using «robots» should be taken into consideration that robots are not obliged to follow the instructions and can ignore this tag. In particular, harmful robots that scan the Internet for security vulnerabilities and gather email addresses used by spammers will not pay attention to them. 

Meta tag for encoding a document is used by a browser to choose a code table that gives the correspondence between code characters and their images on the page. If the encoding is wrong, the text on the page will be unreadable.

For example:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1251">

If this meta tag is missing, a browser chooses encoding by itself, determining what symbol type to use. However, sometimes it cannot clearly identify page language and offers completely different encoding. Thus it is better to use the meta tag. But when the server is assigned with particular encoding, the browser, after reading the charset, translates the text into the specified encoding. Then a double change of characters happens, which slows down the work.

Viewport meta tag specifies the webpage area that users can see. Many search engines rank pages depending on how useful they are for mobile devices.

Standard tag:

<meta name = viewport content = "width = device-width, initial-scale = 1">

Without the viewport meta tag, webpages are displayed with the usual desktop width and then scaled to the bottom. All this makes them difficult to read. Setting the viewport meta tags allows controlling its width and scaling to correspond to the screen size on all devices.

Checking meta tags

Meta tags analysis tools are extremely useful during examining metadata on pages. They provide the possibility to study in detail whether meta tags are located in the right place and are appropriate for the page. The higher ranking, the higher chance for the page to be shown and attract more visitors. 

There are several ways to check meta tags:

1. Look at the page's source code through the browser settings (developer tools).

2. Install a special browser extension. Many plugins facilitate the work by collecting metadata information. They calculate the number of characters and provide information analysis using different parameters.

3. Use the bookmarklet (this is a script presented as a browser bookmark and executed after clicking). It is required to transfer the link to the bookmarks panel and click it. A list of page meta tags will appear on the screen. Many websites on the Internet offer an extensive list of bookmarklets depending on the requirements and end goal of use.

4. Install the computer program. This service is convenient for complex website checking or all pages simultaneously. There is also an application that allows extracting metadata from photos making it easy to deal with fakes.

5. Services for checking tags online. Enter URL and get full information about the meta tags of the page. Online-analyzer or meta tag inspector helps you to see how the search engine reads the page data.

Search engines such as Google use metadata from meta tags to understand the additional information about a web page. They can use this information for ranking purposes, displaying fragments in the search result and sometimes they can ignore meta tags.

Meta tags do not affect the page's general appearance, but they demonstrate web indexes, page theme, and page content displayed when registering in search robots and different search engines.