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 social networks all allow marketers the ability to provide metadata specific to the channel and therein lies the opportunity to provided titles, descriptions and pictures that resonate directly with audience in a given channel.
Meta tags are HTML elements that provide information about a web page for search engines and website visitors.
These elements must be placed as tags in the <head> section of a HTML document so therefore need to be coded in your Cs-Cart. Some are easier to implement than others where things like merely writing a headline creates your H1 tag and there are specific sections to add your own canonical links or meta descriptions. None of them are as complicated as they sound though.
Google or the other search engines can’t "see" your images, but it can "read" them and what it reads is what you write in the alt-attribute. Alt-text should be clear, descriptive, concise and not stuffed with keywords. Alt-text is also what’s used by screen reader software to describe images to people with visual impairments. The alt-text also shows up in the text box that appears when you hover over an image.
Google Authorship mark-up (rel=author) was a big deal just a few years ago, as it meant you could tag articles with the writer’s name and create their own rich snippet featuring the author’s profile picture.
Sadly in 2014, Google removed authorship results in search listings no longer tracks data from content using the markup.
However, you can still use the tag for your content, and there’s every possibility that it could provide some kind of trust signal or feed information into the knowledge graph.
If you have duplicate content issues, there are two identical pieces of content that exist in your store, or you’re looking to move the link equity from one page to another you must include a Canonical Tag which contains the original or primary URL.
This will pass all of the PageRank and other Google ranking signals back to the original webpage, informing the search engine that this is the page that should appear in search results.
The Canonical Tag will look like this in the link HTML:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/" />
The H1 tag is what visitors see at the top of your page. Your headline or webpage name will (in the majority of cases) form your H1 tag.
H2 H6 tags tend to form any subheadings in your article. It’s a good idea to break up you content with as many H2 and H3 tags as possible, but try to use them in a descending, logical order.
Normally you’d only use one H1 tag per-page. Although this isn’t strictly true if you’re using HTML5 where you can use one H1 per section.
The meta description is the short paragraph of text that appears under your page’s URL in the search results, it’s also something you should have complete control of in your CS-Cart.
Write succinctly (under 156 characters is good), clearly and make sure it’s relevant to your headline and the content of the article itself.
Add rel="nofollow" to any links that you don’t want search engine crawlers to follow.
For example:
<a href="https://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">EXAMPLE</a>
This basically means that Google does not transfer PageRank or any other ranking signal across these links.
You’re encouraged to use nofollow for any paid links (such as those brought about by sponsored content or native advertising), links for products in return for reviews or publicity and untrusted content.
It’s also a good idea to make sure any comments on your website are automatically nofollow as this can be a haven for web spam.
Adding a noindex tag to your page will stop search engine crawlers from indexing that particular page. You may wish to use this if you want to keep certain pages private.
To prevent Google web crawlers from indexing a page, place the following meta tag into its <head> section:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
To prevent other search engines indexing a page on your site:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
However Google warns that it is still possible that your page might appear in results from other search engines.
Social Media is obviously a great place for content discovery, but oftentimes the meta data created for Search is not enough to encourage people to click through therefore it is best to use the meta tags each social platform provides. These meta tags are not about keyword stuffing at all, but rather grabbing people’s attention and getting them to click. We all know that the users of Google+ are primarily tech people, users on Facebook are busy stalking their ex-girlfriends and Twitter users are bombarded with timelines moving at the speed of thought. Let’s talk about the channel-specific metadata options.
Facebook's OpenGraph allows you to specify metadata to optimize how your content appears in a user’s timeline. The added benefit of using this data is that by creating an "Edge" in Facebook you can obtain some fantastic data about the users checking out your content via Facebook Insights. If you don’t use Open Graph tags Facebook will default to standard metadata.
Due to its overwhelming adoption, the other social networks will all default to Open Graph Meta tags if there are no other meta tags present. However only prepare one set of metadata is to ignore the ability to speak to the different people in the different channels. Understanding that Google+ is mostly tech users, Facebook’s audience is far more varied and Twitter’s audience is often dealing with content flying by at the speed of thought why not account for that with your metadata?
For more information see the Open Graph Protocol documentation.
Twitter Cards are simply Twitter’s answer to the Open Graph Protocol and you might have noticed them in the wild, but here’s a screenshot from Twitter’s documentation.
The added benefit is making your content stand out in the otherwise chaotic Twitter timeline and ultimately bringing back more people. Also, it has long been thought that many users will retweet an article without actually reading it, using Twitter Cards as advertisements will help facilitate resharing of content as well. Most of these tags mirror what you’ve just read about Facebook Open Graph so I’ll be brief.
There are more optional twitter card meta tags such as site and creator which specify the twitter handles of the site and the author of responsible for the content, but they are not required for the content to make a good first impression so I have omitted them. For more information see the Twitter Card documentation.
Until recently, I hadn’t realized that while Google+ will default to standard metadata or Facebook Open Graph tags, the platform also gives webmasters the ability to specify metadata specifically for Google+ using Schema.org. The beauty of it is since it’s Schema.org you can use it on nearly any HTML tag on content that is already on the page.
While all the other types of metadata go in the <head> section of the code, this code will potentially live in various places throughout the website. Here’s an example (from Google) of how it could be employed.
Google+ looks for metadata in the following order: Schema.org > Facebook OpenGraph > Standard Metadata > Best Guess from Scraping. See the Google+ Snippet Documentation for more information.
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