Meta Tags What Are They, Will They Increase Traffic to My Site and Do The Search Engines Care?

Meta Tags 101

A Meta tag is located within a website's HTML code. They are one of the ways that search engines determine how they are going rank and list the site as well as determine the website content. Meta tags contain descriptive phrases, keywords and other information. Traditionally, search engines displayed the Meta tag description as part of the search results, depending on what the visitor was searching for, and what information that the site contained. Google does not use Meta tags for this purpose anymore; it formulates its own description based on the content within your website.

The predictability of the earlier search engines enabled the practice of keyword stuffing. The idea was to cram keywords into a webpage in order to increase traffic to a website. If you want to learn more about keyword stuffing please check out my article on the top 10 no-no’s to search engine optimization. Basically it involved filling a Meta tag and other tags within a websites html to get their pages to appear at the top of the search engine results. Usually this was done by filling the Meta tags with tons of keywords. This was the old way of doing things and this practice has gone the way of the dinosaur and trying to increase traffic using this method now usually results in getting your site banned.

Meta Tags and Search Engines:

Today search engines, like Google and others have moved away from giving Meta tags as much importance as they used to. Instead they rely heavily on the content within a website to determine its purpose and relevance. Though most of the major search engines no longer depend on the Meta tag to provide information on what a website is all about, smaller search engines still utilize this information in determining the relevance of a website. Therefore, it's worth it time to become your own meta tag analyzer.

Meta Tags Basic Structure

We will use the following Meta Tag for this article to get a better grasp and understanding of this HTML tag. First off a Meta tag is placed at the top of one’s HTML between the [head] tags and before the main body of the website. Here is the basic structure.

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="ABC provides informative articles on search engine optimization."

META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="search engine optimization, website optimization services, seo, increase search engine ranking, top search results"

Meta Description Tag

The Meta Tag description appears under the title tag in your html. In looking at our example, the Meta description is the text between the quotation marks. Essentially this is a brief summary of what your webpage is all about. One of the more aggravating things about search engines is they used to use this as the section that would appear when a visitor did a search on Google Unfortunately, they don’t play as big as a role for the search engine spiders anymore in deciding your content and how they will rank it.

Meta Keyword Tag

Meta keywords used to be the single most important factor to increase traffic under the various keywords you chose for a particular page. Well now a lot of search engines Google especially, doesn’t even look at them, while other search directories like MSN and Yahoo still give them little value. However you should still use them within your HTML and add them to your Meta tags. If nothing else, it forces you to focus on the keywords as you write out the content for your page.

Optimizing Meta Tags:

Becoming a Meta Tag analyzer isn't hard to do and although the search engines don't look at them as strongly it is still critical to keep the Meta tags relevant to the specific goal of a website. For example, if you page is about hockey, then you do not want to include words like basketball or soccer in the keyword description of the Meta tag. Also long gone are the days of trying to plug 20-30 keywords within the Meta tag. Instead use the old adage "Less is More" and limit the number of keywords to between 5 and 8. The idea is to make your WebPages more content rich and focused. Example,

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="ABC provides informative articles on search engine optimization."

META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="search engine optimization, website optimization services, seo, increase search engine ranking, top search results"

The above example illustrates both some good techniques and some bad.

The Good

The keyword list was kept to a minimum and hopefully the web content would reflect a more focused idea structured around these words. The description part of the Meta tag tried to incorporate some of the keywords in the summary description of the website.

The Bad

Note that one keyword (website optimization services) has nothing to do with anything in the description. It is very likely that this keyword is irrelevant to the content on the page.

Spiders and Robots

I’ve touched on this a little throughout this article to stress that the importance a few years of having this structure was extremely important to not only increasing traffic but in how search engine were going to rank your page. Now the spiders and robots that roam the virtual world indexing as they crawl along do not place this structure as being gospel anymore in relating the content on your page. However, it’s still a very wise practice to use them, as some of the smaller engines still base some of their databases on these Meta Tags.

In Summary:

Today, search engines have changed their strategies in how they evaluate Webpages. Today the buzz word is "Focused Content" that is writing pages dedicated to a specific topic focusing our keyword research on that topic and creating a page with proper keyword density. I could go on but long gone are the days of throwing up a simple page and cramming the meta tag full of keywords and as a result see an increase in web traffic. If anything the practice of using Meta tags is more for the user then they are anymore for the search engines. I still like to use them for the fact that they keep me focused at keeping my pages structured and with a goal in mind. That is to create a content rich page that isn’t overloaded with keywords but rather focused on a few important ones.