(1 vote)
The short but indecisive answer is yes and no... it depends. Yes, it depends. In some search engines, Yahoo and Ask, meta tags still hold some weight. In others, Google and MSN, experiments conducted are inconclusive but indicate that meta tags hold little or no weight. However, in no case will using meta tags hurt your rank. And in all search engines, optimizing your meta tags serves at least some function. Therefore, I would still encourage you to use meta tags – although don't make them the focal point of your SEO strategy. Because any advantage you can get in SEO is worthy taking advantage of.The most important meta tags for SEO
While there are quite a few meta tags you can use (meta keywords, meta description, meta author and meta robots...) , the two that you want to focus on are meta keywords and meta description. The others are not all that important with one exception. If you have one that looks like this in your <head> region... <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>, remove it right away. A no index tells search engines not to bother cataloging your site or your page... Not something that works well when you are trying to implement an SEO strategy.
As for meta keywords and meta description, here is what they look like and what they do.
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Meta keywords. This provides a place for you to reiterate your most important keywords. It looks like: <meta name=”keywords” content=”place your keywords here”>
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Meta description. Provides a description of what is on the page. It looks like: <meta name=”description” content=”put a keyword rich description of your page here”>Note: When optimizing meta tags for SEO, particularly the keyword meta tag, you want to include keywords, but only your most important keywords. Avoid stuffing keywords at all cost. More than a handful will look like SPAM to a search engine. And in either case, they will read only the first few. Also, be sure that the keywords you use match those in the content.
Another thought: Meta tags can also provide a place for you to include misspelled versions of your keywords and reinforce some of the more obscure, long tail keywords for which you would like to rank and are found in your content.
Where do optimized meta tags go on the page and in the html?
When placing meta tags in a html page, they should be found in the head section, which looks like this:
<head>
<title> your title here </title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”insert your keywords”>
<meta name=”description” content=”insert your description”>
If you need some help generating meta tags...
If you are stuck and need a meta tag generator, here is a link to a tool that will help you generate your meta tags... although its nothing fancy.
Meta Tag Optimization Experiment : Do meta tags still work?
Search Engine Land tested four search engines, putting an unknown word “qiskodslajdmnkd” and a few choice others in the meta elements. After allowing time for the sites to be re-crawled and indexed, here are the results...
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Google : No impact. The site did not rank or show up for the made up words.
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Microsoft Live : No impact. The site did not rank or show up for the made up words.
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Yahoo : Impact. The meta tags made an impact on rank and retrieval.
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Ask : Impact. The meta tags made an impact on rank and retrieval.
To read more about this experiment, visit www.searchengineland.com
What do meta tags do outside of SEO?
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Indexing : Meta tags are always indexed, even by Google. In many cases, they are helpful to the search engine in categorizing the page, even if they do not impact rank.
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Retrieval : Meta tags help search engines retrieve pages based on the users search query and the keywords / description found in your meta tag. Yahoo and Ask are examples of search engines that use meta tags for retrieval.
In Conclusion : The value of meta tags to SEO optimization
Marginal. Although they can't hurt. And they may give you a slight advantage in Yahoo, Ask and other search engines that still employ the tag. My advice, include them if you have the time and the technical expertise, if not, skip em.
Thanks for sharing Meta information .seo blog is more informative and sometimes it is better than seo book like this blog.
As far as rankings are concerned meta description tags are not help. However, it helps to increase the relevancy of the page when a user search for any specific search query and the results he/she get on search engines.
It actually helps a user to identify whether the page is relevant to their query if yes, then user clicks on the listing otherwise they looking for other listing. So, in short meta description tags are important for any SEO company or individual who doing on-page optimization.
Thanks for this awesome post.Nice explanation.I really appreciate your work.
regards:
seo jacksonville
Thanks for this awesome post. I was looking for this kind of information on SEO.
Most useful article on SEO tips and tricks learning. I have gone through whole article and found that it have every aspect which is important for website optimization.
Regards:-Orange Count SEO
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