Meta Tags SEO

By Jamie Faidley Tweet

Meta tags provide information to the search engines about your site.  Using them properly can help you rank higher in the results and they can also increase your chances of getting user's to click through to your site.  Let's take a look at the main tags and the proper way to use them.

Keywords

There are still some webmasters out there who think meta tags have a very important role in ranking their site. A lot of these same site owners are big on keyword density too and we have already discussed how falling in to that trap can hurt your site's rankings more than help them.  Search engines used to look at the keywords meta tag a long time ago, but due to the amount of spamming this caused they don't really pay attention to it any longer.  I honestly don't even use the keywords meta tag any longer.

Title

The title tag is used by the search engines to rank pages and is the best way for you to tell the spider what your page is about.  They are important to use and use right.  You want to be specific and to the point with your title tag, using the keywords you want to target on that page because it will not only help that page rank higher for those terms, but they will appear bold in the results.

Title tags are tough to abuse because you are limited to only 70 characters (you can have more but they will be truncated in the results).  That is why I suggest targeting only 1-3 keywords per page.

Description

The description meta tag is not used by the search engines to rank pages.  However, the description is very important because it is shown when the search engines display their results.  You are limited to 156 characters here and you are going to want to use the keywords from your title because they will show up in bold in the results.

However, since this tag is not used for ranking purposes do not stuff it full of keywords and appear spammy.  Instead, use it to entice users viewing the results to click on your page.   This is your ad copy so include a call to action by telling the user exactly what they will learn by visiting your site and maybe even listing a phone number to call for more information.

I have also found it important to use a different description for each page, and make it unique from the copy of your page.  Four years ago I found my pages suffering in the rankings a little bit because I was copy and pasting the first sentence of the article, so don't repeat my mistake.

Robots

If you are using WordPress then you might have an SEO plugin that will set this for you automatically.  The values that you can use are "INDEX", "NOINDEX", "FOLLOW", and "NOFOLLOW".  All of your main pages you will want indexed and followed, but your archive pages like categories, tags, and dates some people use the noindex attribute on so they don't run into duplicate content issues.

Additional Resources:

• 5 Meta Description Tips
• Metatags and SEO
• Robots Tag Information

Related Posts:

• Keywords & Domain Names
• Easy Keyword Generator
• Keywords Per Page Strategy
• SEO Keyword Strategy: How Many to Target?
• Page Level Google Penalties