Effective Meta-tag Optimisation for SEO - Myths, Facts and Strategies
While some SEO
guides put meta tag optimisation up on a big pedestal (complete with crown and
sceptre), others ignore it totally! Today we are looking at the power of meta-tags - exactly what they
can do for your site's SEO potential, as well as best practices for creating them.
The value of meta-tags today
Are good meta-tags a silver SEO bullet that will leave your competitors for dead in the rankings? Not
quite … but they shouldn’t be ignored, either. Back in the early noughties, when SEO was a very niche
term, only the biggest companies had decent websites, and the entire internet was basically a big digital
product catalogue and ordering service, very few people optimised their meta tags. This made them a
real 'get ahead' strategy for people that took the time to do so. Additionally, in SEO terms, Google
seemed to weight the meta-information much more heavily in their algorithm than they do nowadays.
Should I bother with meta-tagging?
So, if meta-tags are no longer a ticket to the SEO big time, should you even bother with them? Most
certainly. Here are the top reasons that meta-tagging will be a part of SEO activities for some time to
come:
Because everyone else does it. This might mean that it has no special value anymore … apart
from the fact that if you choose not to pay SEO attention to your meta-tags, then you'll be that
much further behind your competitors in the rankings who have done so
Because Google is still paying attention to your title tags, even if they aren't as heavily weighted
as they once were!
Because your title tag appears at the top of the browser window, and a small but significant
proportion of people look at this. Including keywords in your title tag is not only important to
Google, it lets your customers know they are in the right place.
Because your description tag appears in search engine results, and could well be the difference
between getting a click from that number one Google