Meta Tags
Many of you can say “surely we don’t need to worry about
meta tags, as most search engines ignore them” and for the
most part you would be right.
The importance of meta tags has diminished so considerably
over the past couple of years, that I fully expect this to
be the last article that I will write discussing their optimization.
That’s not to say that they are already a dead issue, but
in the next 6-12 months their importance will be virtually
extinguished.
So, if this will likely be my last article on the topic,
what is there left to discuss? Well actually there are still
a few things you should consider when researching and constructing
meta tags. While search engine marketing has moved into the
realms of page themes, keyword density, content and linking,
meta tags can still provide some benefits.
The meta description tag is located in the <head> area
of your website’s HTML code and its content is sometimes displayed
in the results page of crawler search engines. The description
tag looks something like this in your code:
<meta name="description" content="Brief
description of the contents of the page">
It used to be that all search engines would pull this information
and use it as part of their search results. Not only would
your search engine listing include information from your title
tag, but also below it would be a copy of your meta description
tag.
With this predictable structure, search engine marketers
could manipulate the way their website listing was displayed
in the search engine results by changing these tags.
In addition, the meta description tag would have great importance
when determining which position your website showed up in
the search results. The number of keywords, their relevance
and density within the description tag could be manipulated
to help achieve the elusive #1 position on the search engine
results.
Then along came Google
When Google became the search engine of preference, it ushered
in a new era of how search engine listings are displayed.
Google chose not to use the meta description tag and instead
rely on the content contained within a website.
The biggest impact from this decision resulted in the meta
description having no significance whatsoever on where a website
is positioned within Google’s results.
A website owner could optimize their description tag to the
highest degree, and it would have little effect on how their
website was positioned in Google.
The other effect of choosing to ignore the description tag
was that Google did not use this information as part of the
website’s listing; instead formulating it’s own description
using content extracted from the web page itself (only if
there is very little page content will you see Google display
the meta description).
When it became apparent that Google’s approach was successful,
other search engines started following suit to the point that
few search engines today spider and display the meta description
tag.
|
