The Truth About Meta Tags and SEO

What are Meta Tags

Meta tags tell search engines about the content on a website. For 2018, meta tags don’t play a huge role in SEO but that doesn’t mean you should ignore them all together (more on this coming).

As I said, this doesn’t mean you should ignore Meta Tags. I believe strongly in an organic approach to search engine optimization. This means fill out all the details in the back end including Meta Tags. While one thing may not be important today, you never know if it matter tomorrow. the algorithms used by the search engines constantly change.

Three Main Meta Tags

Description
Keywords
Robots

All of these are optional but I encourage you to fill these in as such. Robots are used by Google. Be sure to include this file. Descriptions are not used to determine ranking by Google BUT they are usd to create snippets (that little bit of text you see just under the website link when you do a search) and also optional. I encourage you to complete this. Keywords are ignored by Google and also optional. Don’t get me wrong, they won’t rank you but that doesn’t mean it won’t help you to be found by someone searching. If time is an issue, this is the one to leave out.

Best Practices

The meta description is important both for visitors and for the search engines. They should be unique for each page. Write for your visitors, not just the search engines.

Google now displays around 300 characters (the limit used to be 160) so write for this if you want to make sure it doesn’t get cut off.

Consider what you are able to do consistently. If you don’t have the time to write meta descriptions or fill in keywords, what can you do consistently?