Following last week’s post on the importance of Document Titles (The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 1 – The Document Title) I wanted to continue the discussion on Onsite SEO Factors today and talk about the use of Meta Tags.

Meta Keywords

There are two key Meta Tags that most people look at when they talk about SEO: Meta Keywords and Meta Description. Meta Keywords allow you to enter in descriptive words and phrases that you feel best showcase what your page is all about. They are placed between the and tags in the HTML and look something like this:
Right now, as an example, the Young Entrepreneur blog Meta Keywords tag looks like this:

Make sure to put in keywords that are related to your website and are potential descriptors that you think your clients would type in when looking for your services.

Meta Description

The Meta Description tag allows you to add more context to the keywords and put in a paragraph about the website in full sentence format. The key here is to write out a description instead of just listing a series of keywords. In HTML the tag looks like this:

Our blog Meta Description, as an example, is: 

Does Google Care?

Meta Tags have gotten a lot of attention recently because Google has essentially dropped their importance from their index. The Meta Keywords are no longer paid attention to and the Meta Description, while not used for the ranking relevance, is still important as it is used to display the text to the user in the search results. For example, if you type in “Young Entrepreneur Blog” into Google you will see that our blog comes up #1 and the description under it is “Tools and resources for Entrepreneurs and business minded individuals who are growing their business.” It is the same description that we used in the Meta Description Tag. So while the Meta Tags won’t help you rank higher in Google, they can help convince people to click on your site from the listings in Google.

Another point to keep in mind is that while Google has downgraded the importance of Meta Tags, other search engines haven’t and because Meta Tags are essentially hidden (they cannot be seen on the page unless you view the HTML source), it’s still a good idea to include them because every little bit of SEO work helps!

Evan Carmichael