There has been a great hype on using Meta tags and content descriptions for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The very first things I was ever taught about SEO are the lessons on writing Meta tags and descriptions.
I was told that they work like magic and are able to put your website on top of the ranks. You just have to put them on your website code as elements of the HTML or XTML. They should provide the metadata, data and detail the page description, keywords and other information about the webpage where they are placed to make that page search engine-friendly.
But further readings on Meta tags led me to realize that these things I learned about them are now mere magnifications of their power and benefit for my website. In short, Meta tags and other Meta elements are no longer as important as they were before.
About 10 years ago, Meta tagging was the hottest thing to do for SEO. Simply by putting these elements on your page, you could easily improve your website’s search engine rankings. But this was until they got misused and abused. Spammers started to use spam keywords with these tags to make them rank higher than the straight and genuine websites. For these reasons, all the major search engines dropped meta tags from the equation.
The improvements in search engine spider technology have also caused the robots to ignore the tags in the website codes. Google, as a matter of fact, no longer uses meta tags, keywords, or descriptions at all.
According to Dave Bush, one of the SEO gurus and experienced developers I once worked with, there are three basic rules in SEO.
Rule number one is that anything that can be abused will be.
Rule number two is that anything that can be abused will get discounted in the equations.
Rule number three is that the more “natural” the links to your website and your site itself looks, the better the chance of making it to the higher ranks.
Although some websites say that it has completely lost it’s worth in SEO, I believe that meta tagging still does work somehow. Some search engines still do utilize these tags and descriptions and Google uses them to search for websites and generate results.
Meta descriptions can still help the click through. For example, your main phrase is “seo wordpress plugins”, the Title tag should have that and the description should lead off with that phrase.
The description should also be basically a sales copy, sort of like writing a Google ad word advertisement. Doing this will increase the chances that Google will use the description rather than using some random text in the middle of the page. Using this technique, you are 7 times more likely to make a sale off natural search than real ad words.
In summary, both meta keyword and content descriptions still have their place in SEO but not too much fuss should be spent on them. Since they are now just small elements in optimizing your website, too much time and resource should not be given them. In short, they don’t work like magic at all.
While working at the economical SEO firm http://www.bergstrom-seo.com, I did some research. The more research I did, the more I decided that meta tags and page titles are really important. If you hire an economical SEO firm, make sure that they do this properly. These are used as snippets to describe your website in the SERP pages. They’re also used by search engines to figure out what your website is about. They need to be well written and unique.
Description meta tags are important because Google likes to use the page title and meta description tag in it’s search engines results pages. Note that we say “might” because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page’s visibletext if it does a good job of matching up with a user’s query. These tags need to both accurately describe the website, and motivate viewers to click on your search engine results page listing.
If you’re looking for a good introduction to SEO guideline that an economical SEO firm can follow, check this one out. http://www.bergstrom-seo.com/resources/google-search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf. It was written by google, and it’s really good.