The secret to high rankings is writing keyword-rich tags, right? Well, yes and no.
Meta tags have always played an important role in search engine optimization; however, they’re still just one part of an overall strategy to achieve high rankings. But employed correctly, they can certainly help clarify which pages should be ranking for selected keywords, and increase rankings for those pages accordingly.
Here, we’ll examine three types of SEO meta tags: title, description and keyword:
Meta Title Tag
The title is the most important of all of your tags. As the search engines attempt to figure out what the page is about (i.e. what keyword queries best match the page), they rely on the title more than any other factor. The title appears on the top bar of your browser, as well as in the clickable link on a search engine results page (SERP). This is a great place for a couple of variations of your top keywords, but be careful not to overdo it. Just as you wouldn’t want your on-page content to look like spam, you don’t want to keyword-stuff your title tag!
Meta Description Tag
Unlike the title tag, the keywords in the meta description don’t hold quite as much weight; however, this doesn’t make this tag any less important. The meta description appears under the title tag on a SERP – it’s the two lines that describe what the page is about. In essence, it’s an advertisement, and it’s often the reason someone decides to visit – or not visit – your site.
This description should be short, descriptive and enticing. It’s the perfect place to advertise a special offer or sale. The question to ask yourself when writing your meta description is: what will make people choose to visit my site over the other websites that offer the same product or service that I do?
Google automatically bolds any keyword phrases that match the search query, so it’s a good idea to include a keyword or two in the description. This is a quick way for Web users to see that your site’s content matches their keyword phrase – and therefore is relevant to their query!
Meta Keyword Tag
This once-popular tag used to be a good way to tell the search engines what keywords to rank for; all you had to do was place your keywords in the keyword tag. However, this made it too easy for spammers to abuse this feature and now little emphasis is placed on the keywords tag. While it certainly doesn’t hurt to place keywords here, it won’t necessarily help either.
Want to learn more? Type some of your keywords into Google and study your competitors’ title and description tags. And, as always, feel free to contact Web.com Search Agency at 1-877-Rank-321 if you have any questions!
Tags: meta tags
