On-Page SEO - Meta Tags
With all the diferent tags avalible out there, we are not surprised at the myths and missuse of meta tags for SEO purposes. We have seen, read, heard, and tested them all. We even admit, it's not always simple. For example, their are special circumstances when he NOODP or NOYDIR tags can help, but these are becoming less nessassary today, especially if you are building your site right in the first place.
To break it down simply, you should really only care about one meta tag - the meta description tag. To break it down even more, this tag should be no more than ~160 characters and be highly relevant to the web pages copy. When we say “ highly relevant”, we mean like 100% relevant.
The meta description tag is important for two reasons:
- The search engines still use it
- It helps improve your sites organic CTR in rankings
It's a fact. This tag is even important enough that Google Webmaster Tools will let you when you have duplicate meta description tags on your site. If this doesn't convince you, other 3rd party SEO tools like SEOmoz pay attention to this tag. Their tool even alerts you if they find your tag is too long or too short.
Even if we throw out the notion that the content on you description doesn't helps your rankings directly, thier is a secondary element that will. As search algorithms become increasingly more complex, the trend has become to lean more on user data to fine tune rankings.
To stress the imprtance, Google's own Webmaster Tools shows you average rank and CTR of your keywords. Your organic CTR matters in a similar fashion to your Adwords Quality Score. If people engage with your site by clicking on it when it ranks, then your fine. On the other hand, if your ranking well for a keyword, but you have a poor CTR you could see rankings slip until you can fix the problem and show the algorithms that your site does in fact belong in the top rankings.
These two SEO factors don't appear to be going away any time soon, and are why crafting an intising meta description tag is important to your sites SEO future.
What about the meta keywords tag?
The meta keywords tag – it does nothing. Google and Bing have publicly said this tag has been abused and misused for years. They can't trust the concept and so they no longer use it in their algorithm.
In our own testing and observation, we hold their statements surrounding this tag to be true. We have seen sites that spam this tag up with dozens of keywords, duplicated the tag over and over and see little negative effects. On the flip side, we have seen sites rank well that don’t use this meta tag at all.
No matter what you do, their appears to be little effect from using the keyword tag.
Contact a Sweet Spot Marketing®, Account Manager and ask them about creating an SEO plan for your business. Call toll-free at (888) 505-7111 or fill out the form on the Contact page.
