SEO Basics My Father Can Understand: Meta Tags

Editor’s Note: My father has pointed out that he’s 64, not 65. He was born in 1946, while my mother was born in 1945. She likes younger men. Either way, I’m still writing SEO tips to help my father better optimize his insurance website.

Whenever I’m discussing meta tags, I find the hardest part is the pronunciation. Some people say “may-ta”, some people say “meh-ta”. I’m more of a “meh-ta” person, but to each their own.

Meta tags, or meta information, aren’t typically seen by the human eye. You can always think that meta information is information about your page. As an example, a new story has a byline, publish date, and a headline, all of which could all be considered meta-information about the article.

While a web page can have many types of meta-tags, but only two types of tags that are important for SEO: description and keywords.

But, here’s a little secret: neither meta tags really play a role in search rankings. Years ago this was true, and some people will still tell you that you need to properly populate meta-keywords, because that is where the search engines used to look. Then people figured out that they could start stuffing keywords into this space, hoping to rank for everything. Because of this gaming of the system, Google doesn’t use this information any more.

Don’t believe me? Check out this video of Matt Cutts, a member of Google’s Search Quality Team: Google Does Not Use Meta Keywords in Web Rankings. Some other other search engines, like Ask!, will take meta keywords into account, but they aren’t weighted very heavily.

Meta-descriptions also won’t help your search engine rankings, but a good description will help get you more traffic. If the search engine determines that you have a good description, the description will be used as the “snippet” on the results page. A good snippet will get someone to click on your link, especially if it is relevant to the page. The image below highlights exactly where the snippet appears.

Click to Enlarge

Some description best practices are:

1. Use a unique description for each page. You want to use this space to actually describe the page. Don’t reuse descriptions.
2. Keep the descriptions to less than 150 characters. After 150 characters, the description will be cut-off with an ellipsis (…), as seen in the example above

Ultimately, meta tags aren’t as important as they used to be, and don’t let lost in the weeds here. But, because so many people still talk about using these areas, I wanted to make sure to address the topic.

Tagged as: feta, meta tags, SEO, snippet