Optimising a page for SEO with meta tags

Roam allows you to optimise meta tags on every page you create to ensure your pages are optimised for search engines. A meta tag is a snippet of text that describes the content of your page that search engines use to determine what your page is about and how relevant it is to a search term.

Meta tags will often be the snippet of text that appears on search engine results pages, as you can see in the example in the image above.

Pro tip: while taking the time to add meta tags is an important step in optimising a page for SEO, remember that the content you add to the page itself (as well as many other factors) will also have a huge impact on your ranking. There isn't one magical formula to ranking in search results, it's a seriesof best practices that all rollup into an optimisation strategy! 

How to add or update your SEO:

To add or edit your SEO metadata open the page you want to update and click to the SEO tab. 

1. Adding a Meta Title 

The Meta Title field should describe the key value proposition of your website. A meta title shouldn't be longer than 60 characters and include the name of your site. See the example below. 

2. Adding a Meta Description

The Meta Description field should expand on the key value proposition of your website. A meta description should not be longer than 300 characters.

Pro tip: Don't bury the lead -- only approximately the first 150 characters will appear on mobile search results! 

If you haven't done any keyword research to help inform your meta descriptions, best practice is simply to put yourself in the mind of your visitor: what information do they need to see at a glance to know this page is relevant to them and that they should click on it? 

It's all about empathy! 


 Note: Meta Descriptions do not help increase the ranking factor in search engine result pages, however the content you add here is still highly relevant and will have a significant impact on the click through rate from search engine result pages to your website.

3. Add Open Graph "OG" fields for social media 

OG field is short for open graph and is Facebook's version of meta tags. The OG image you set will be the image Facebook automagically pulls in when someone shares your page. The OG title will be the title associated to the image, OG description the description. 

Many people will duplicate their meta title and description in their OG fields. There's nothing strictly wrong with this and you won't be penalised, however, OG fields are a good opportunity to ask yourself "what resonates with someone sharing this on social media?" and ensuring your page resonates depending on what distribution channel your visitor is ingesting a page on. 

RELATED: best practice for optimising your pages for social sharing 

4. Optimising individual pages

Although we set up optimisation on the admin level, if you wish to, you can override these settings by optimising individual pages yourself. Every standard page, campaign lander page, product page or blog page has its own SEO tab within. Here, you can decide how you want the information to be displayed in the search engine and social media for that particular page.

4. What if I don't want my page to appear in search results? 

You’ll also notice our Roam SEO pages have fields called Robots. As the name might suggest, these fields are sets of instructions for search engine robots on how to handle your page. 

Select No index if you do not want your page to appear in Google search results. It is recommended that this is always unchecked however there are a number of situations where you would not want a page indexed on Google. A use case for no index could be if you've built an industry page -- it gets a lot of traffic, and you don't want Google to think this page is important for all visitors and surface a link in search results. You only want people you have specifically given the link to, to visit the page. In this case, click on No Index. 

If your page is already indexed on search engines, adding the no index tag to your page will not immediately remove it from search engine result pages. This change will occur when Google next crawls your website. This can take 1 week - 2 months depending on how frequently Google decides to crawl your website. To expedite this process you can manually request the page to be crawled again via Google Search Console’s request indexing feature.

No follow tells Google you don't endorse the content on the page. Sometimes you might want to feature content that's useful to visitors, but you don't want to pass any "priority" to the page. You might still want it to appear in search results when the page is relevant, but you don't want the page to gain any "authority" when it's shared on other pages.