Meta Tags every web page should have

Let’s get back to basics. The most important function of metadata is not the ability to influence rankings, but its ability to encourage your content to make the best first impression possible. The Big 3 social networks all allow marketers the ability to provide metadata specific to the channel and therein lies the opportunity to provide titles, descriptions and pictures that resonate directly with your audience in a given channel. 

 

Adoption of New Metadata

The Common Crawl, which is an incredible resource that all SEOs should be at least mindful of, has developed a microsite called the Web Data Commons where they identify trends extracted from the Common Crawl corpus. Schema.org, the new vocabulary that search engines have forced us to learn without providing too much immediate benefit, appeared in 43.05% of the 1,811,471,956 typed entities that appeared in the 3,005,629,093 URLs on the 40,600,000 domains that make up the August 2012 Common Crawl Corpus. As you might imagine the highest occurring microformat types being used are by far VideoObject (Schema.org) and Breadcrumb (RDFa). This makes complete sense because those are the two that have the most direct value in the SERPs.
When compared to the 2010 Corpus, RDFa was of course the most popular, but in 2012 Schema.org came with a vengeance quickly closing the gap. You might think it more reasonable to use RDFa rather than Schema.org, but with the search engines pushing it you can expect a higher reward from Schema.org. So it’s a good time to embrace it.
Now on to the list! 

 

The Usual Suspects

While Google keeps messing around with our tried and true understanding of the title and meta description they are still the most important meta tags for an SEO to prepare. Obviously, the on-page content is key, but if we can’t get them to click through then what is the point?  For the time being let’s just dive into the usual tags.

 

Page Title

Long regarded as the most important on-page factor, the title tag has recently come under some intense scrutiny. A recent post has determined that page titles aren’t limited to 70 characters, but rather pixel-width. Also a little further back Cyrus Shepard tested titles longer than 70 characters to see what Google would do. In the wild I’ve seen extremely long titles are often chopped down or rewritten algorithmically to display the most relevant text to a query. Unless you want to measure the pixel-width of your titles and hope that Google shows the right thing, your best bet is to make page titles as keyword-relevant as possible and up to 70 characters. I honestly can’t think of a case where I’ve left something up to Google and they did a better job than I thought I could.
Format:
<title>Up to 70 Characters of Keyword-relevant text here</title>

 

Meta Description

If your webpage were a commercial, this would be its slogan. In our upcoming search behavior study in cooperation with SurveyMonkey we’ve found that 43.2% of people click on a given result due to the meta description. Gone are the days of meta descriptions that listed keywords and just said the “Official site of…” and the main purpose of this text is to draw the user in, let them know what to expect if they click and convince them to do so with a strong call to action. The kicker is you get 155 characters to make it happen; think of it as like writing a tweet, but with 15 extra characters.
Format:
<meta name=”description” content=”155 characters of message matching text with a call to action goes here”>
Authorship Markup – Google is going to rank content that is connected to authors that they deem to be reliable sources over content that is not. A cool visible incentive is that you get name and your pretty picture in the SERPs if you’re an author. If you’re a publisher your posts start appearing in the right rail of the SERPs.

Now let’s look at the metatags that make the magic happen!

 

Rel-Author

This is a meta tag that can be implemented that specifies who the author of a piece of content is and uses Google+ to identify them. Initially Google rolled this out as just a tag that you place in the <head> of the code, but ultimately they would realize it’s not realistic that authors will have that type of control over the page and expanded to a more modular form.Format:For the version that goes in the <head> tag, you use the following:
<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR PERSONAL G+ PROFILE HERE]“/>
For the more modular version you would emulate XFN’s rel-me and place the link directly on the page. I’ve got to admit this is a great link building strategy.
<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>

If you use this method you will have to take the second step in verification by linking to your content from your Google+ profile. For more information see Google’s explanation. Rel-Me – Rel-me is just the XFNversion of rel-author. You simply place the meta tag on a link back to your Google+ profile.Format: <a href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR PERSONAL G+ PROFILE NUMBER]” rel=”me”>Me on Google+</a>

 

Rel-Publisher

Rel-publisher is for business entities to claim ownership of their content. This can be used in context with rel-author or in place of it, but you should be pointing to a business profile on Google+ rather than an individuals.Format:<link rel=”publisher” href=”https://plus.google.com/[YOUR BUSINESS G+ PROFILE HERE]“/> Don’t be late to the authorship markup party as it would not be surprising to see Google wipe out the visibility of content simply because there are no verifiable authors connected to it.

I'll look at Meta tags for Social media in a follow up post.

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