Meta Tags are Still Going Strong

Meta tags are the first topic of most SEO training, for better and worse. Just add meta tags and your website will magically rise to the top, right? Wrong. So, why do you need them? The short answer is: They help tell search engines and users what your website is all about. Also, Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo show meta tag information in their search results.

The two most familiar is the keyword and description meta tags, but it is a lot more to it than that. But let's start with these two. Some experts like to pretend that the META description and the META keywords don't do anything to your ranking. They miss out on several points. Not only does Google shows your description tag but by adding a better and more relevant text, more people will click on the link and that provides you with a better CTR (click through rate) which has a huge influence on your ranking!

Meta Name Description

You use this tag to explain to your visitor and search engine what they can expect to see on your site. Almost all the major search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing will use your description tag.

How to use it

If you have some knowledge of codes and HTML you'll be able to type the following line ( the meta description tag ) in the head-part of the source of your web-page. Bogus words like "qiskodslajdmnkd", misspelled words, your competitors name in the keywords are indeed useless. But if you create your meta tags with care, search-engines will use your tags one-on-one. A better html page title and an optimization of your meta description tag gives a higher CTR. It's very important that you use the keywords you want your site to be found under, in your meta description tag. The more frequently a search engine spider finds a certain word on your website and in your meta tags, it values that word as important. Your site will be positioned higher in the search index. Make sure to put some extra effort in it, it will attract extra visitors to your web-page. Create relevant and different meta tags for each and every page.

Meta Name Keywords

Most SEO experts will probably tell you that this tag is dead, you don't need it, and search engines don't care, and you shouldn't waste your time on it. This tag was at the earliest stage of the Internet a critical element to any website that wanted to rank high. Then the spammers, came took advantage of it and filled it up 100s of keywords, to improve their rankings. Due to this the major search engine had to stop emphases on this meta tag. Today some SEO experts tell you to get rd The best practice is to keep it on you. It's very important that you add the keywords you want your site to be found under in your KEYWORD tag. If a search engine spider finds the same words on your website and in your meta tags, these words will be ranked higher in the search index. Don't add too many words, the most search engines will only index the first 20 words. Make sure that you put the 10 most important keywords first. The truth it keep it relevant with the rest of your page, and it will place Yes, I put this on the indifferent because while no good SEO is going to recommend spending time on this tag, there is the small possibility it could help you somewhere. So please leave it out if you're building a site, but if it's automated there is no reason to take it out.

Meta Content Type (Popularly called The Charset Tag)

This tag is necessary to declare your character set for the page and should be present on every page. Leaving this out could impact how your page renders in the browser. A few options are listed below, but your web designer should know what is best for your site. Finally, all sites must validate charset. In the U.S., that is the UTF-8 tag. Just make sure this is on your page if you're delivering HTML using English characters.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html" charset="UTF-8">.

META Language Tag - Required By Bing

Language – The only reason to use this tag is if you are moving internationally and need to declare the main language used on the page. Check out this meta languages resource for a full list of languages you can declare. Does your website contains pages in different languages? By adding index pages with different language tags you are able to adjust the language to the specific country.

Where should you add this language tag?

You may add these language tags to all of your web-pages, so not only in the first index page. Make sure that on every page relevant meta tags are added. Add keywords and phrases that are relevant and correspond to the text and the language on that specific page. It might be a lot of work to add specific meta tags to each page but you will notice in time that it works!

Robots Meta Tag

The robots tag is still one of the most important tags. Not so much for the proper implementation, but the improper. The robots meta tag lets you specify that a particular page should not be indexed by a search engine or if you do or do not want links on the page followed. Believe it or not, it is still common for a site to be deindexed because someone accidentally added a noindex tag to the entire site. Understanding this tag is vitally important. NOTE: The robots tag may be ignored by less scrupulous spiders.

Other Meta Tags

There are many other meta tags, but none are really considered useful nowadays. Many of the tags that we used did things like:

• Tell the spider when to come back:
  <meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
• Tell the browser the distribution:
  <meta name=""distribution"" content="web">
• Tell the page to refresh:
  <meta http-equiv=""refresh"" content="30">
• Tell the page to redirect/refresh:
  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="x_seconds; url=http://www.yourhost.com/">

We don't use these anymore, either because there are better ways (such as schema tagging or server side methods) or because the engines they used to work on are no longer in existence or Google has explicitly told us they are not great ideas (such as redirects at the page level).

NOTE: Schema tagging and rich data snippets are single-handedly the most important (and somewhat quietly announced) change to how your site interacts with the search engines and the search spiders. Learn it. Know it. Implement it.

Conclusion

While meta tags aren't the magical solution that you may have heard, they still play an important role in helping your website get found in search engines. Enjoy your metas!