The Importance of Meta Tags
For the uninitiated, meta tags are pieces of code within your website that contain information about each page. These tags are supposed to tell search engines and users what the page is about. If you're a little rusty on your Internet jargon, here's a primer. There are essentially three types of meta tags that concern most marketers:- Title - This is the text that appears in the title-bar of your web browser.
- Description - This is a quick summary of the information on the page.
- Keywords - These are words that are important in the page.
Unfortunately it wasn’t long before the search engines cais litught on to thtle trick, and as a result the usefulness of "keyword-stuffed" meta tags dwindled over time. Posts on Search Engine Optimization bulletin boards and forums heralded the demise of the meta tag with posters claiming that Google all but ignored the meta tags. It seemed that there was no use for meta tags anymore - at least from the perspective of the online marketer.
Meta-tag Re-emergence
The situation now is less clear - it’s certainly no longer as simple as just adding meta tags with lots of derisable key words, but, meta tags still have their uses. The major search engines now rely on a number of factors in ranking a page. The Title and Description tags are certainly important but the content in these tags must match the content in the page itself. The keywords for example should appear in the body text, but should also appear in the link text and page names also. The keyword or phrase should also appear through the body text, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. The main role of the meta tags in this process is to ensure that the clickable links in nthe search engine results pages is an accurate and enticing description of the content of your web page.
Remember the Human Beings
The main point is that although the search engines probably have devalued the SEO value of the meta-tag to a great extent, that doesn't mean that it isn't important. When people search for keywords in your industry it isn't enough to be Number 1 on the list of results. You still need to convince those humans to click on your link. The way to do that is to design the most effective page description that can possibly appear in the search engine results page.