How Important Are Meta Tags Today?

Meta Tags have been one of the most basic elements of SEO. It is a must to know for every SEO practitioner.

Though meta keywords tag and meta description tags are not the main factor search engines consider when ranking sites, they should not be left off the page. A meta description tag is supposed to be a brief and concise summary of your page's content. A meta keyword tag is supposed to be a summary list of the most important words on your page. They were both proposed in order to make using the web easier. Unfortunately, webmasters over the years have abused meta tags so much that search engine creators have had to de-emphasize their importance in their algorithms.

Question: How important are metatags today?

Answers:

a) Not important at all.
b) They have only minor importance, but it can be neglected.
c) Somehow important.
d) Very important, almost as much as keyword density.
e) They are the single most important SEO tool.

Right Answer is c

Explanation: The correct answer is c. Meta tags are certainly not as important as keyword density but they still cannot be neglected completely.

There are three important parts of Meta tags that you can use:

1. Title – The title tag is the title text that is shown in search engine listings. I know that this is not necessarily a meta tag, but it similarly functions like one.

<title>Title text here</title>

2. Description – The meta description tag is where you would want to put your site’s summary. This is where you put what your site is all about and what you are offering people. It should not be too long because the search engines only read up to a certain number of words.

<meta name=”description” content=”This is where you put your site’s summary”/>

3. Keywords – The meta keywords tag is where you put all of the keywords you use in your site. This is basically where you want the words which will take you to the top of the SERPs page to be. Your keywords are important – even if you take away all of the other words, the user should be able to know what your site is all about when they read your keywords.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, SEO Services, Google, Search, etc”/>

These three things make up your meta tags.

The importance of meta tags is that the search engines read them in order to compare if these keywords and the description are related with the visible content. Are your keywords present in your webpage? Is your meta description related with your content and your site’s niche? There is certain weight in your meta tags that the search engines see, that being the reason, wouldn’t you want to do everything in order to bring your page a little bit higher in the SERPs? That’s exactly the reason why meta tags is important.

Tips for Keeps: Even if meta tags do not hold much water when it comes to page ranking, their importance is still present as the search engine robots validate their relativity to your content and site niche.