A webpage contains different sections. Some sections are visible to users in the frontend while some others are only visible in the backend source code. Meta tags are part of the header section of a webpage and visible only on the source code. Search engines like Google and Bing use these meta tags to understand the summary of the content on your page. Therefore, it is necessary to insert meta data to improve the chances of ranking higher in search engines. Here are some simple meta tag tools to check optimize your webpages.
Meta Tags for Webpages
Remember, you need to create unique meta data for each page on your website. Many content management systems like WordPress make this task simpler by using plugins. However, you have to manually insert and verify meta data when creating HTML pages. For example, using Bootstrap framework for creating pages need manual insertion of meta data on your webpages.
Check this article to understand the complete details of meta tags. Make to insert all meta tags between <head> and </head> section.
In addition to inform search engines, meta tags are also useful to showcase your content beautifully on social media websites. However, you should add additional Open Graph meta in the header section for this purpose.
5 Meta Tag Tools to Optimize Your Website
Whether you already have meta data on your pages or want to create, here are few useful meta tools for you to try.
1. Meta Tags Generator Tool
As the name indicates, meta tag generator is a simple tool that helps you to generate meta data for your pages. Go to the meta tag generator tool and provide the title, description and other details to generate the tags.
In addition to generating title and description you can also control crawlers whether to index the page and follow the links. This is useful to generate meta robots tag for hiding your pages from search engine crawlers.
Note: Google discontinued using meta keywords, hence adding the keywords is optional from search engines perspective.
2. Meta Tags Analyzer Tool
If you have already inserted meta tags on your pages, it is recommended to test the page to make sure the meta data is available. Go to meta tags analyzer tool, type the page URL and click “Submit” button. You will get the result like below showing the status of title, description and Open Graph tags present on the page.
You need to take corrective action when title / description are longer than required length or missing tags.
3. Open Graph Meta Tags Generator
As mentioned, social networking sites primarily use Open Graph protocol to fetch the data needed for displaying the content. For example, you need to have an image, site name, URL, title, description and type of your page, in order to display the shared content beautifully on Facebook. Therefore, you need to use special meta tag tools for sharing content on social networking sites.
Go to Open Graph meta tags generator tool and provide the necessary details to generate the tags for you pages. The tool will instantly generate the tags based on details you provide. You can copy the generated meta tags and paste between the head section of your webpage.
4. Open Graph Meta Tags Checker
After inserting the Open Graph tags on your page, you can use this tool to test everything is fine. Go to the Open Graph meta tags checker tool, provide your page URL and click “Submit” button. The tool will show you details like below with the value found for corresponding tags. You can check for any missing tags and update the tags using the previously explained Open Graph meta tags generator tool.
5. Twitter Card Meta Tags Generator
The last meta tag tools in our list is to optimize content sharing on Twitter platform. Similar to Open Graph protocol, Twitter uses their own format called Twitter Cards for displaying content. You can insert these meta tags to showcase the shared content with smaller or larger images.
Go to Twitter Card meta tags generator tool and provide the necessary details. You can select the type as “Summary” to share the content with smaller image size. Alternatively, select “Summary with Large Image” type to share content with larger image size.
If Twitter Card meta tags are not present on your page, Twitter may use Open Graph meta tags to fetch the content.
Testing Meta Tags Problems
Meta tags analyzer tool helps you to get the meta data for the given page. However, this tool may not be useful when you have hundreds of thousands of pages on your site. There are many premium SEO tools available for doing complete SEO audit of your site. But you need to pay hefty amount for doing this with Semrush, MOZ or Ahrefs. Earlier Google used to show the meta tags problems in Search Console. However, this has been removed in the new interface. Fortunately, you have one free option to use Bing Webmaster Tools.
If you are not using Bing Webmaster Tools, we strongly recommend trying as you can simply use your Microsoft account. You can check out this article on how to use Bing Webmaster Tools account. After adding your site in Bing, give some days time for the crawler to generate reports. Go to “SEO > SEO Reports” section to view all SEO related issues on your website that includes meta tags related issue. For example, you can find the following meta data related issues:
- Noindexed with meta robots tag
- Description is missing in header section
- Description is too long or short
- Title is missing in the header section of the page
- Page is missing meta language information
Each error will show the severity and the number of pages affected with that error. You can click on the error to get the details of affected URLs and the solution to fix the issue.
This is very useful tool to get all the errors in one place. You can read the recommended action and try to fix the meta tag and other SEO problems on your site.
Final Words
Meta tags are important part of optimizing your site for search engines. Using catchy title and description can skyrocket your click through rate and increase the revenue from your website. Good part is that generating and inserting meta tags on your site is easy with the above listed meta tag tools. However, make sure to use unique meta data for each page on your site so that search engines can rank the pages correctly.
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