SEO Tags

I treat SEO tags as the instructions I give search engines so they understand and display my pages correctly. The [title tag](/title-tag/) is the most important. I make sure it includes the primary keyword and is under 60 characters. For a page about how to write a blog post, my title tag might be 'How to Write a Blog Post: 10 Steps for Beginners | Site Name'. That tells Google and the reader exactly what to expect.

The [meta description](/meta-description/) is not a ranking factor, but it is a click factor. I write it as a compelling summary that makes someone want to click – like ad copy, not a keyword list. Heading tags structure the content. I use one <h1> per page that matches the title, then <h2> for main sections and <h3> for subsections. That helps both users and search engines navigate the page.

Canonical tags prevent duplicate content issues. If I have a product page accessible at two URLs, I add a canonical to the preferred one so Google knows which to index. [Alt text](/alt-text/) on images is for accessibility and for Google to understand image content. I describe what the image shows, not stuff keywords. The rest – keywords meta tag, for example – I ignore because Google doesn't use them.

When you launch a new site, every page needs basic tags, especially the title and meta description. I once launched a site with 200 product pages and forgot canonical tags on paginated categories. Google indexed every page as separate, and the main category page didn't rank. Adding canonicals focused the ranking signals, and within two weeks the category page moved from page 3 to page 1 for its target term.

Duplicate content is the second big scenario. If your CMS creates two URLs for the same article, a canonical tag tells Google which one to treat as the original. I've also seen robots tags block indexing by accident – I once had noindex on an entire section for three months. That was a painful lesson. Now I check robots before launch.

Meta descriptions matter most when you rank well but get few clicks. I rewrote descriptions for a set of articles from boring summaries to benefit-driven copy, and CTR jumped from 2% to 6% within a month. For multilingual sites, hreflang tags are critical. I once had a Spanish page without hreflang, and Google showed the English version to Spanish searchers. Adding hreflang fixed that.

I used to waste hours on the meta keywords tag. I thought it was essential and filled it with every variation I could think of. It does nothing. Google has ignored it for years. I stopped and nothing changed – my rankings stayed the same.

I also used the same title tag on every blog post: 'Blog | Site Name'. Google would rewrite my snippets entirely. Once I started writing unique, descriptive titles, my click-through rate improved. I also thought meta descriptions were a ranking factor. They are not. But once I stopped optimising them for keywords and started writing for readers, clicks climbed.

I neglected image alt text for years. When I finally added descriptive alt text across a site, image search traffic increased by about 15% within a month. And I used to add nofollow to all external links – that was pointless. Now I only nofollow sponsored links. My biggest regret? Not using canonical tags sooner. They saved me months of rank recovery on a client site with severe duplicate content.

I keep [SEO Content Writing Services](/seo-content-writing-services/) and [What Is a Content Calendar](/what-is-a-content-calendar/) open alongside this one.