Are Meta Tags Still Crucial To Seo? | Internet Marketing
What exactly are Meta Tags?
If you examine the HTML coding of a web page, the Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted o the header of a web page, between the opening and closing HEAD tags. Meta tags provide information about your Web page to search engine robots so that the search engine can better understand what your site is about.
Are Meta Tags still important to SEO?
Meta tags were the original way to tell search engines what your page was about. Meta tags list information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core information. However, due to spamming of keywords and massive abuse of Meta tags by adult-oriented sites, their importance has greatly diminished in the search engine algorithms.
Thats not to say that meta tags are entirely pointless. Yahoo! And Bing still make use of Meta Tags in their search engine algorithms when it comes to ranking websites, Google places importance mostly on the Title Meta tag and the amount of backlinks to a webpage.
Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what character set to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content. Meta Tags arent always required, but as a rationale, it makes a lot more sense to take advantage of them than to leave them out. If the Meta Tags are not in place, the search engines will generate their own description of the site based on the content observed from the first 200 words of your web page. This may not always be optimized for keyword density, therefore affecting your pages ranking in the search engines. By correctly optimizing Meta Tags with your targeted keywords, you have much more control over what is displayed in the search engines for your web page.
SEO tips for optimizing your Meta Tags
Meta tags are certainly not magic bullets for search engine ranking, but they are far from being dead. Meta tags with informative, well-written descriptions and targeted keywords and phrases should be an integral part of ones promotional strategy.
Title tag: This will be the most important meta tag since Google pays special attention to the keywords used within the Title tag. Ensure it is no longer than 70 characters long and insert your main keyword at the beginning of the Title tag for maximum effect.
Description tag: This is the second most important meta tag because it is displayed in the Search engines, and should contain keywords reflected in the Title tag, and an accurate summary of what the page topic is about. Do not use more than 155 characters in the Meta description tag.
Keywords tag: This may be the least critical Meta tag as Google doesnt pay much attention to it as a result of the prevalence of keyword spam. A general rule is to contain keywords that happen to be present within the page content, with no more than 10 keywords recommended.
Understand how Meta Tags affect your sites performance in the search engines. Visit Advantage SEO. Information covering search engine optimization, PPC advertising, web design, usability issues and social media marketing.
Source: www.imarketingcentral.com