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Maybe you’ve heard that meta tags, which several years ago were great seo tools, are dead. Not true and here’s why.
If you already know what a meta tag is, skip this paragraph, if not here’s a little background. Meta tags give search engines information about your site, but are typicaly invisible to human readers when they are looking at your web page. They exist in what’s know as the head section of your webpage and if you didn’t build your own site you may never have seen them at all.
Two meta tags that have been abused quite a bit for the purpose of improving search rankings are the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag. The keyword meta tag has been thought to be being ignored by search engines for some time. It turns out that this is not 100% true. A friend did a test using fictional words like upmertopft and put them in the keyword tag of several sites. In fact I participated in this little study and added such words to a couple of my sites. He then let the whole thing cook for about 60 days before searching the search engines for these words. It turned out that while none of the sites showed up in either Google or MSN for the word they did in Yahoo! Just to be clear the words appeared no where in the text or other tags so this is the only way it could have been picked up. How much weighting does Yahoo! give to this? I don’t know and I wouldn’t suggest spending much time on this tag because the effect is probably tiny. Set it once with your company name, most important keywords and miss spellings of those keywords and forget it.
The meta description tag is a completely different story, and here’s why. It is generally held that the meta description tag is no longer used as a factor in determining what keywords your page will rank for, but that’s not the end of the story. Your meta description tag is often used by Google and other search engines as the description that users see under the title when they land on a search engine result page. This little fact makes them important for how well you rank, at least in Google.
You see one of the factors that determine how well your page ranks in Google is how often it is clicked on when it does turn up as a search result for a query by a Google user. The more often your page is clicked on instead of the pages above and below it, the higher it rises. This may seem a bit unfair, since it is well known that the higher a website is on a search result page the more likely it is to get clicked on but the fact remains it is listed as a ranking factor in Google’s patent.
So what does this mean for you and using your meta tags? Don’t spam up your meta tag with a bunch of keywords that wont help you get placed higher and it may turn off potential visitors. Instead take the time to write a quality description for each page. Make sure it is accurate, descriptive and intriguing. It should leave the person browsing wanting to know more.
