If you've tried SEO yourself you have undoubtedly heard about meta tags. If you're not familiar with the term, simply do a
Google search on them, and you'll get your fill.
In a nutshell, the term "meta tags" is kind of an umbrella term for a few tags that most people use on their web pages, mainly the meta keywords tag and the meta description tags.
These tags are not something that you see on your web pages content, but rather, are located within the code on your web page. They are meant for the search engines eyes and many people use them in the hopes of it helping their rankings.
That being said, let me give you a little bit of history on one of the tags, the meta keywords tag.
Years ago when the search engines were in their "growing up" stage and Google was just hitting the search engine world, it was discovered that by placing all kinds of words and phrases in your meta keywords tags, increased your rankings.
As a matter of fact, this was such a factor, that the more keywords and phrases you had in your meta keywords tag, the better. As is with most discoveries, this got overused and abused. Once people realized that all you had to do was place tons of keywords within this tag (some related and some not related), everyone under the sun was using this technique in order to boost their rankings.
Not so today. While the meta keywords tag is still used by a vast amount of people, it will not boost your rankings as it used to. As a matter of fact, search engines today give very little weight to the keywords located within this tag.
I still recommend to my clients to use the meta keywords tag but to keep the number of keywords in that tag to two or three. Mainly using the two or three main keywords that you use on the web page itself.
The meta description tag however is another matter. While it doesn't boost your rankings, it can be a great sales tool. If you visit that link I just gave you above, you'll notice that there is black text underneath the blue links. This is the content of your meta description tag.
If you aren't using one on your web page, then the search engines just gather whatever information they can from your web page and use that as your description instead.
The savvy marketer will write a description that entices a reader to want to learn more. it will give just enough information to get people to the website. Once they're there, you will want to keep them there and that's up to you and the content you provide.
- Kristine
