The second part of our Website Migration series is all about meta data and why you shouldn’t neglect it if you are having a new website. This blog applies to all websites, regardless of whether you are undergoing a website migration because it is an influencing factor in helping both users and search engines understand what your content is about.
What is Meta Data?
Meta data are short snippets of text that act as signposts that tell search engines (and users) exactly what a web page is about.
Even if you have never heard of meta data before, you would almost certainly have seen it with the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when searching for something in Google. It displays in the format of a title and a short description, like this:
Meta data is a really important feature to help with your search engine ranking. It helps search engines understand the content of a web page so it can generate the most useful results for its users.
Whilst Google uses a number of ways to generate the description snippet shown above, it is still best practice to manually create meta data for each of your webpages as it will help to influence the quality of the snippets and ultimately enhance your website’s visibility in search engines.
Why is Meta Data Important?
As meta data is displayed in search engine results, having an accurate and compelling page title and description, allows you to influence people choosing to click on your webpage over others and improve your search engine ranking.
To fully take advantage of how meta data can influence your content in search engines, there are SEO (search engine optimisation) strategies that can be applied to optimise the success of your meta data. This includes:
- Using relevant keywords that relate to the content on the page
- Choosing only 1-2 keywords per page to focus on and creating meta data around those keywords
- If you are a local business, append your location to your chosen keyword to have better chance of ranking locally
Keyword tools such as UberSuggest and SEMrush can help you find targeted keywords relating to your products or services.
How to Add Meta Data:
You can add or update the meta data through your content management system (CMS) and this should be unique for each page on your website.
If your website is built in WordPress, there are SEO plugins to help you add your meta data and some plugins give suggestions on how to improve it based on your chosen keyword.
Some of our favourite plugins include; YOAST, All in one SEO, Rank Math, and Monster Insights. Once you’ve installed your chosen plugin, you’ll see the meta data displayed when editing your pages.
Here’s what it looks like for this blog using our plugin, Rank Math:
Be sure to remember, the titles and descriptions both have character limits. 60 characters for the meta title and 160 characters for the meta description. Not sticking to the limits can cause ellipses to show in your meta description during a web search which can truncate it in the search results.
Why is Meta Data Important During a Website Migration?
During a website migration, it is important not to presume that all your valuable meta data on your existing website will be migrated to the new website.
In some cases, if certain pages of your website are directly transferred to your new site, metadata may copy over – but it’s important to check.
If you are creating brand new content or having a complete website overhaul, it is important to create new and unique meta data for each page.
It is always good practice to regularly review your meta data to ensure it best reflects the pages content and update any changes to keywords which you may be ranking for.
How we can help…
At Moorhouse Digital, we offer comprehensive website audits which include the review of your meta data and a detailed action plan for how to enhance it along with many other features. We can help you to get the most from your website and optimise it for lead generation.
Contact us for more information or book a free 30-minute consultation.