Meta tags

Search engines use your site’s meta tags, such as page titles and descriptions, to understand what your content is about. This page walks the meta tags group of the SEO checklist: Metatag defaults, Schema.org structured data, and hreflang tags for multilingual sites.

Goal

Your default meta tags reviewed, and structured data and hreflang tags added where your site benefits from them.

Prerequisites

• The SEO checklist opened and saved once; see Work through the SEO checklist.
• What meta tags and structured data are; see SEO essentials.

Steps

Open the checklist at Configuration → Search and metadata → SEO Checklist/admin/config/search/seo-checklist and work down the meta tags group.

Review Metatag permissions

Drupal CMS installs the Metatag module with the SEO Tools add-on, so this item is already complete. Metatag adds descriptive information (meta tags) to your site’s pages, improving your content’s visibility in search engines.

Use the item’s Configure permissions link to ensure that only trusted user roles have permission to manage Metatag settings.

Review the default meta tags

Sensible defaults are pre-configured by Drupal CMS and the Metatag module. Well-configured meta tags improve search visibility and click-through rates by telling search engines and users what your content covers.

1. Use the item’s Configure link, or go to Configuration → Search and metadata → Metatag/admin/config/search/metatag, to review the defaults.
2. To change a default value, select Edit from the Operations column.

Add structured data with Schema Metatag

Have you noticed direct links to a menu or a recipe inside a search result? That presentation comes from structured data: JSON-LD markup in the header of your pages, following the Schema.org vocabulary. The Schema Metatag module adds it for you.

This item suits sites aiming for enhanced search engine presentation or advanced SEO, especially content such as recipes, products, events, or articles intended to appear as rich snippets in search results.

1. Download and install the Schema Metatag module.
2. Install the modules for your specific structured data types: go to Extend → List, enter Schema.org in the Filter field, scan the list, and install the ones that match the type of content on your site.
3. Each Schema.org module you install adds a group of fields to the Metatag defaults at Configuration → Search and metadata → Metatag. Under Operations, select Edit for each type, then configure the Schema.org fields at the bottom of the form.

For background on why structured data matters, see Create SEO juice by adding JSON-LD structured data (Lullabot.com).

Add hreflang tags on multilingual sites

The hreflang attribute indicates the language and geographic targeting of a page, helping search engines deliver the correct language version to international visitors. On a multilingual site, the Hreflang module adds an hreflang tag for each enabled language automatically once installed, which significantly improves international SEO. Skip this item if your site has one language.

For more depth, see how Google handles localized versions of your content (developers.google.com) and the multilingual chapter of the Drupal User Guide.

Verify

• View the HTML source of any page on your site: it contains a title tag and a description meta tag managed by Metatag.
• If you installed Schema Metatag, the page source includes a JSON-LD script block with your Schema.org data.
• The meta tags group of the checklist shows your completed items saved with a date.

Related

• Previous in the checklist: Clean URLs. Next: Submit your site to search engines.
• SEO and social fields covers overriding titles, descriptions, and share images per content item.
• SEO essentials shows what these tags look like in HTML.