SEO Meta Tags – Usage and Myth

A Meta Tag is a piece of information about a website that is sent out to a web browser to help a search engine, which is scanning the website, to know what the website is about.  Meta Tags were once very useful in the SEO of a website since they were easy places where crawler-based search engines could look for information.
However, with thousands of websites being launched every day and the increasing competitiveness for search engine placements, Meta Tags were soon the subject of dishonest SEO practices. This lead search engines like Google to revise their criteria of rating websites.

The two primary SEO Meta Tags are the Meta Description and Meta Keywords tags.  Meta Description tags contain a short, concise description of a page. Meta Keywords tag contains a list of the most important words or phrases describing the page.

Even though the Meta Keywords tag has lost its importance with most search engines today, Google and many other search engines will still use the Meta Description tag to list your website. The Title tag is important for the same reason.

Meta Tags are specifically written for search engines using html language and are not visible to the users. SEO Meta Tags will provide information about a webpage to the search engines; they are an indicator of what type of information can be expected from the webpage and are important if you want your webpage to show in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

5 Tips to Ensure Good Results from SEO Meta Tags

• Each page of your website should have a Meta Tag
• Add keywords in Meta Tags defining the theme of your website
• Do not include company name in the keywords
• Give proper description of the webpage related to the current content
• Add a Title tag not more than 15 to 20 words matching your content

7 Myths about SEO Meta Tags

• Adding all the Meta Tags in the html source helps:
• NO. Stick to only title, description, and keywords tags.
• Keyword stuffing is good:
• NO. Use keywords that are relevant to your content.
• Listing keywords has a formula:
• NO. Keywords can be separated with commas and no space, or space and no commas, or comma and space.
• Title tag doesn’t do much for SEO:
• WRONG. Like your content, title tags are for your audience, and can motivate click-throughs.
• Copying SEO Meta Tags from top ranking competitors means your site will do just as well:
• WRONG. What may work for one site may not work for the other. There are several other factors that decide SEO results for a site.
• Using description and keywords in a comment tag helps ranking:
• NO. It may have been in vogue once, but today it is considered spam.
• Using as many different keywords through the site helps:

NO. Keywords/key-phrases should be unique terms describing a webpage and not exceed 10 to 15 in number.

Writing SEO Meta Tags requires skill and knowledge combined with a focus on marketing objective and flair for copywriting. Well-written Meta Tags will not only make it easy for search engine crawlers to scan your site but also motivate users to take positive action.

By : exceltip.com