The Truth About Meta Tags
April 17, 2009 by Andrea Morgan
Filed under SEO
As almost anyone with a website knows, although meta tags are not absolutely essential, most websites have at least three. One is a title meta tag, the second is a keywords meta tag, and the third is a description meta tag.
The title tag (surprise!) contains the website title. The title in the meta tag may not be the same as the headline at the top of the site seen by its visitors. For example, the on-page site headline might be “Education for Working Adults”, while the meta tag title might read, “Part Time, Online, and Distance Degree Programs”. In fact, there is a logical reason why a website owner would want the two titles to be different.
The reason is that the function of the website headline is to describe the content of the page for visitors who are already looking at it. The title tag’s function, is to help determine the way in which search engines categorize, index, and rank the site. Although a surprising number of website owners choose a title for use in their meta tag without much thought or research, they do so to their detriment.
If you doubt it, do a simple experiment. Pick a search term, any search term, and see which websites come up in the top 10 in Google or Yahoo. Then view their title meta tags. Almost without exception, you’ll find the search term.
Google, Yahoo, and MSN seem to ignore the keyword meta tag, perhaps because of the way it has been misused in the past. However, webmasters should not ignore the keyword tag because many of the smaller search engines and numerous directories factor it into their indexing and/or ranking algorithms.
The description meta tag plays no role in search engine rankings. But, some search engines and directories use the verbiage in the tag to describe the site to searchers. Thus, the copy in the description meta tag will often determine whether a potential visitor decides to become an actual visitor or selects another site. Write a good description tag and you will be rewarded with more traffic. It’s a no-brainer.
Unfortunately, for many website owners, meta tags are an afterthought. And even many of the so-called search engine optimization gurus don’t seem to understand their value. I hope that now you do.
