Meta Tags

  There seems to be a bit of confusion around what exactly “optimizing” your web site’s pages really is.

Many people associate SEO or optimizing your pages as updating and “optimizing” your meta tags. Specifically, the meta keywords tag.

First, a bit about meta tags.  Meta tags are those pieces of code that the search engines don't see but that you can view by looking at the source code of your website. 

If you're familiar with code you'll know that your meta tags look like this:

<meta NAME="Meta Tag Name" CONTENT="content goes here">

While there are varying kinds of meta tags, the meta keywords tag seems to get all of the attention when it comes to optimizing your website.

The fact is, very few search engines (Yahoo being an exception), use the meta keywords tag as a factor in determining what your web page is about.

It used to be a very large determining factor but as with anything that’s easily manipulated, it became exploited by some unscrupulous webmaster's who would place all kinds of unrelated (but popular) terms in these tags in the hopes of getting ranked well. And it worked. For a short amount of time.

So the question is, should you be using them at all?

Well, Yahoo still considers them a factor as stated in their webmaster's guidelines so it is still helpful to use them, but just remember that the words you place in this tag are only a fraction of the optimization factors that go into your entire website optimization campaign.

On another note, the meta DESCRIPTION tag is very important for a few reasons.

First, the meta DESCRIPTION tag gives the search engines a brief summary of your web page.  If you neglect to place a description within your web pages, the search engines will generally take a selection of the text from your page and use that instead.

While using a meta DESCRIPTION tag won't catapult you to the top of the search engines, it is incredibly important for those people who do find your website in the search engines.

Consider your description for you page a "sales point" to get them to come visit your website.

Which brings us back to our topic at hand…meta tags and SEO are not the same thing. Meta tags are only a small portion of the overall criteria in SEO and by using ONLY meta tags in your web pages and not considering other factors that determine where you are listed within the search engines, you are doing yourself a tremendous disservice.

Look to more important tags, such as your title tag and the name of your page and most of all, do not forget that content is extremely important.

Find out more about each of the different meta tags and what each one does for your website.

You might also be interested in our SEO Tips on what to avoid when optimizing your website.

 Kristine Wirth offer free SEO tips and advice that are gathered from an online career spanning over 10 years.  You can get these same tips and advice at http://www.SlingBrain.com.  Or by signing up to the SEO Tips & Traffic Advice Newsletter at http://www.slingbrain.com/SlingBrain-SEO-Newsletter.php

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