What exactly is a meta tag? If you don’t know here’s an explanation to help you.
A meta tag helps a search engine understand what kind of data is on your page. A meta tag is a piece of data describing the data on a specific page, and that’s why it receives the ‘meta’ label. These tags aren’t much different than tags you see describing blog posts, such as ‘Denver Online Marketing’ or ‘Denver SEO business.’ However, some meta tags live within HTML and you would only see them if you knew exactly where to look. In fact, some meta tags have no effect on SEO campaigns at all.
Meta keyword tags were once the backbone of SEO. If you stuffed enough keywords into the meta tag, you had a good chance of appearing at the top of a SERP. However, times have changed, and keyword meta tags really have no impact on your SERP ranking anymore. For now, don’t worry about meta keyword tags.
The most important kind of meta tag is the meta description tag, which is viewable on the SERP page. This data is usually seen below the clickable title tag, and it can be a critical factor in whether people click on the link to your site or not. If your meta description tag does not adequately tell the user what kind of information is on your page, then you will likely not get a visitor.
Many people mistakenly believe that users click on links because of page rank, and not because of content. The truth is that very few people click on links before investigating them. We find that people who take the time to read through meta descriptions and click are more likely to be targeted visitors who are ready to do business. Knowing this, we recommend you write a well-thought-out description, so that eager customers can find the information they need more easily.
So, what are some basic rules to follow when filling out meta description tags?
- Always create a unique description tag, and never duplicate one.
- Aim for a 30- to 150-word summary of what information a visitor can find on that specific page.
- Use both primary and secondary keywords, but don’t overstuff keywords so that the description is illegible or full of spam.
- Pretend the quick description is an advertisement for your page and ask yourself how to describe the data while getting people to click and view it.
If you fail to write a meta description tag for a page, then a search engine will write it for you, and it will not help to entice people to visit your site. Even though Google has clearly stated that this tag has no impact on rankings, it can help to increase your click through rate.
Now, let’s get back to meta keyword tags. Here at The Great Online in Denver, we really don’t worry about them. Our only advice is to throw a few keywords in there and forget about the rest. No need to worry about spacing, formatting, or length. Most search engines don’t factor them into algorithms anymore, and Bing only uses it to filter out spam. Meta keyword tags used to be of the utmost importance for SEO, but times have changed. They are now totally irrelevant to search engine’s algorithms.
We realize that these topics can be confusing to people, especially those that live outside of the digital marketing world. It’s our job to know these things. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don’t be afraid to contact The Great Online, your online marketing company in Denver and source for information. We are here to help you.
