Traditionally, the Meta data that you included in the coding of your website played a very important role in your SEO ranking. Google’s spiders would crawl through this information to establish what type of website you had and rank your site accordingly.
Unfortunately, many businesses took advantage of this and stuffed keywords into the Meta data – even when those keywords had nothing to do with the website. As a result, search engines reduced the importance of Meta data when determining your SEO rankings.
Despite this, it’s still good practice to implement Meta data. There are a number of reasons for this as outlined below…
The Title Tag
The title tag appears at the top of a user’s browser window when they are looking at a page. The title tag can also be clicked on, diverting the reader straight to the page in question. If written well enough it can captivate the reader, compelling them to click through to read on. Using the right keywords, your readers will know that your website contains the type of content that they are looking for.
But the title tag is not only good for human users. Search engine spiders see the title tag before anything else, and index that page accordingly.
Description Tag
Using the description tag is also good SEO practice because this is what your readers will read after the read your title tag. This can make or break their decision to read on. Take advantage of the 160 characters available to write a compelling, persuasive description tag that perfectly describes what your page is about.
The Keyword Tag
Last but not least is the keyword tag. Even though the keyword tag is not actually acknowledged by Google or other search engines, it’s still helpful to use it to keep track of which keywords you are targeting on each individual page. This helps to keep everything more organised so that you know where your anchor text links pointing to each page should be.
Rounding Up
Although Meta tags won’t necessarily make or break your SEO campaign, it’s still good practice to include them in your high quality content, good URL structure and clean coding.
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