Meta Tags Are The Foundation Of Every Good SEO Campaign

Meta tags are a critical component of SEO success.

In search engine optimization terms, a "meta tag" is an HTML tag that’s placed at the start of your web page code. For search marketers, they are the equivalent of ad copy for organic search results with the ability to have influence and impact searchers and persuade them to visit your website.

The trouble with meta tags is that many search marketers claim they no longer matter to SEO, so they often ignore them completely.

The reality is that meta tags are as important to your SEO efforts today as ever. And omitting them from your website can have serious, negative consequences.

So What are Meta Tags Anyway?

For anyone new to search marketing, meta tags are snippets of HTML code on a web page that send a signal to search engines about your page’s content. All meta tags are invisible to your site users (except for the "title" tag), and are displayed in the search results for the benefit of searchers as a sort of “preview” of the information contained on a particular web page.

The goal is to create good copy for the snippets to get searchers to click on your search listings.

How Do I See My Site’s Meta Tags?

You can find and view the tags for each web page by right-clicking anywhere on the page, and then clicking on the “view source” option.

By doing this, you'll see a sequence of HTML tags. The most important of these tags are your “title tag,” “description tag” and to a lesser degree “keywords tag.”

Users who visit your website will see this information displayed in the following ways:

• Title Tag - The text you see at the top of your browser bar. This is the "title" of your web page.
• Meta Description - A short description or synopsis of the page.
• Meta Keywords - A series of keywords you denote as relevant or important to that particular web page.

Why are Meta Tags So Important to SEO?

These tags have various levels of impact on your website. Let’s look at each tag in greater detail to get a better idea.

Title Tag

This is the most important of all of the tags discussed here for the purposes of effective SEO. The title tag weighs heavily on your site’s search engine rankings, and serves as the headline for your site’s “ad” in the SERPs. A searcher’s decision whether or not to click on your search listing often relies on having a good title tag.

Meta Description

The meta description tag's main purpose is that it shows in response to search queries as a search engine's summary of your page. This is important because the meta description is essentially serving as your "ad copy" within the organic search results. A well-written meta description will convince searchers to click on your listing.

Meta Keywords

It’s reported that Google no longer uses the meta keywords attribute in its algorithm, but there’s evidence that Yahoo and MSN still place some value on this tag. So the best approach is to include this tag for the engines that do recognize it as a valid search signal.

Finally, what’s also important to note for meta tags is that the searcher’s keywords are bolded in the text for both the title and description tags in the search results. So here’s even more incentive to pay attention to meta tags for SEO.

Meta Tags Really Do Matter

So now you know that meta tags actually have a very big impact on search engine rankings and SEO for your website. These tags play an important role in telling searchers what your web pages are about and getting them to click through to your site. If you ignore them, you run the risk of poor click through in the search engine results and poor SEO performance.