TrueInsight Newsletter

The Truth of the Meta
What Are Meta Tags—And Are They Still Important to Your Site’s SEO Efforts?

If you think titles and tags are just another expense that comes with car shopping, you’re probably missing out on an essential element of your search engine optimization strategy.

Meta tags—including the all-important title tag—are HTML codes that are inserted into the back end of each page within your website. These codes provide descriptive data about each page to the search engines. (The word meta means “description or definition” in IT-speak).

Meta tags aren’t nearly as critical to your site’s search rankings as they were five years ago; you can thank keyword spammers for that. But they still offer you some ability to control how your Web pages are described and indexed by the search engines—and that can ultimately determine if a user clicks on your search engine listing or not.

Let’s take a look at the five most important meta tags still in use today and how your website can make the most of them.

Title Tag
The title tag is the most important tag of them all. Unlike most meta tags, search engines still very much consider the title tag when ranking your Web page. They also use the title tag to generate the title of your listing in the final search results that they display to the end user.

That means your title tag has to be both search-engine friendly (i.e., keyword-rich without being keyword stuffed) and user-friendly (i.e., informative and engaging). Take this title tag for example:

It tells the search engines and the end user nothing about the content of the page. By adding a little description to our title tag, we’re more likely to get both indexed and clicked:

Description Tag
Every major search engine uses the Description tag in some capacity to index your Web page and summarize it for the end user. Some search engines use the description tag verbatim in their listings. Others use it in conjunction with your page’s content to craft their own descriptions. Either way, it’s best not to leave your site’s description completely up to the search engines, because it may turn out like this:

Instead, take the time to create description tag that works in tandem with your title tag to fully inform the search engine and compel the end user to click on your listing.

Keywords Tag
The keywords tag is like the index of a book, allowing the search engines to quickly run through a list of all the keywords covered off on a particular Web page. Trouble is, most crawlers now ignore this tag after years of abuse. (Early spammers, for example, would include “sex” in the keywords tag of just about any Web page they created, knowing that it would bring lots of search engine traffic to the page regardless of its actual content).

However, a few search engines still support keyword tags, and every little bit of SEO helps. So if you decide to proceed with keyword tags, be sure to use them to list the key terms in your page’s content (two to three terms tops), but also one or two synonyms and/or spelling variations for those terms. If one of your key terms is commonly misspelled, be sure to include the misspelling too.

Alt Text
The major search engines no longer consider alt text—the “alternative” text used to describe your online images—when determining your Web page’s relevancy. (Again, abuse is to blame.) But alt text is critical to having a user-friendly site, particularly for visually impaired visitors.

The best approach to alt text is also the simplest: describe the image as it appears. Feel free to include the page’s keyword(s) in one or two instances, but avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. Most visually impaired Internet users rely on audio “readers,” which can waste as much as a full minute of the user’s time reading a single image’s keyword spam.

Robots Tag
Does your website have pages—like an administrative area or client-only section—that you’d like to keep private? A robots tag tells the search engines not to index that page. If your site features an online calendar, be sure to include a robots tag on that page as well. Most online calendars go on indefinitely, causing search engine spiders to get stuck and greatly hurting a site’s chances of getting indexed.

For any pages that you do want indexed, simply leave them alone. The major search engines index any page they find by default.

Evaluating Your Meta Tags
Now that you know what meta tags do the next step is to evaluate and optimize them on your site. If you’re unsure of what to look for, that’s ok. Meta tags are invisible to the everyday Internet user, and unless your site has an easy-to-use content management system, you’re going to need to know HTML to manage your meta tags on the back end. The important thing is to make sure someone is managing your meta tags for you.

Want help managing your meta tags? Contact your TruePresence consultant or click here to request a meta tag evaluation or additional search engine optimization assistance.