Importance of Metatags in SEO

Friday, 26 February 2010

With some time ago <meta> tags were the main tool for SEO with a direct connection between your text there and your ranking in the search results. Since than, algorithms have improved and metadata’s importance is fading day by day, in particular with Google. However, there are certain search engines still displaying metadata – below the clickable link in the search results – users to read your written text, and in case they consider it relevant, they might visit your site. Moreover, some specific search engines still take in consideration metatags in ranking your website.

Meta Description and why I need it

Meta Description tag I just another method to write a description of your website and directing search engines to topics and themes your site is relevant to. It will do no harm including a short description, so don’t skip this step. Continuing the example with the cat site, your meta Description tag for the site might be something like: <Meta Name=”Description” Content=”Adopting a cat brings you a companion. Things you should know before adopting a cat”>

A possible use of the meta Keywords tags is to incorporate all the keywords you consider relevant to your pages. Although the main search engines will ignore it, it is still another chance to highlight your targeted keywords. You might even include different spellings (misspellings of the keywords too) in the meta Keywords tag. For example, for the cat adoption site you could write something like this: <Meta name=”Keywords” Content=”adoption, adopt, cat, cats, feline, save an animal, get a companion”>. It is slight improvement to search engine top placement, but why not use it?

The meta Robots tag requires more attention. Here, you indicate the pages you don’t want to be crawled and indexed. It is the case of page(s) on your site with content that need to be there but you don’t want to be indexed. Including such page in the meta Robots tag is just one method to prevent them of being indexed. You can achieve the same thing using a robots.txt file and it is considered a better method for it.