Metadata and SEO

Overview.

A website's goal is defeated when it doesn't pass a simple Search Engine Optimization(SEO) test. SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. A Search Engine Optimized website or webpage pulls more traffic to the website. At the end of this reading, you should have an in-depth knowledge of:

metadata
meta tags
meta tag positions
meta tag format.

The use of metadata to improve website optimization seems pretty much overlooked by junior developers. This article covers everything metadata and meta tags, it however does not cover the semantics aspect of HTML.

Metadata simply means information about data. They are written in meta tags and examples are;

Author
Description
Robots
Viewport
Keywords.

Keywords, however, have some controversies surrounding its use as developers tend to generate an endless list of keywords to ultimately fit into any scope.

HTML <meta> Tags

Meta tags are placed in opening and closing tags. They are placed in the <head> section of HTML document and as such are not displayed on the webpage. Meta tags employ a property-value pair approach which usually contains the name and content. The names are the meta tags while the content specifies the property value. An example of meta tag format is shown in the code snippet below;

BASIC META TAGS.

Description
Title
Language
Author
Rating
Copyright
ViewPort

DESCRIPTION

Description metadata provides a brief description of a webpage. This brief description gives Search Engines an avenue to analyze the contents of your webpage and as such improve rankings in Search Engines. For example, you are building a sports blog website, below is an example of how description is used to enhance SEO.

TITLE

Title metadata specifies the title of the webpage.

LANGUAGE

The language metadata specifies the language of the webpage.

AUTHOR

The author metadata specifies the author of the webpage

RATING

The rating metadata specifies the expected audience for your page. Search Engine uses this data to filter its results as regards with age gradients.

COPYRIGHT

The copyright metadata specifies the legal copyright of a webpage.

VIEWPORT

The viewport meta tag specifies the size of the window that web contents occupy. The content section of this meta tag allows a range of parameters, such as width, height initial scale, min scale, max scale.

width	Controls the size of viewport	device-width or number in pixels	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
height	Controls the size of the viewport	device-height or number in pixels	<meta name="viewport" content="height=device-height">
Initial scale	Controls zoom level when page is first load	minimum(0.1) and maximum(10) values	<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1">

All the above meta tags put together in the head section of HTML document helps improve Search Engine Optimization. An example is shown below:

metadata And Seo