Traffic Wonders # 5: Meta Tags: Introduction, Significance and Impact
Introduction to Meta Tags:
Before looking into the significance and its impact on bringing in more targeted traffic, we must get familiar with the Meta Tags. Meta Tags are tags present in the <HEAD> section of your web page, most of its part is not visible to site visitor, but mainly created for web crawlers and search engine bots. Originally meta tags were the main factors for BOTS and spiders in understanding, “What is this site about?” or in simple words, meta tags were the main elements in TELLING SEARCH ENGINE, what your site is all about.
Meta Tag generally provide information to search engine bots and crawlers, and is not visible to website visitors. It gives following details about a site, to spiders:
Previously there were no need to write meta tags in the web pages, as these were meant to communicate with spiders and crawlers and were not for human visitors. Companies like AltaVista and InfoSeek were the first major search engines, who supported meta keywords as tags in the year 1996. Both of them were crawler based search engine. Later on, Lycos and Inktomi search engine followed them and supported the meta tag keywords.
Previously, meta tags were created for web-masters in order to help search engines, in providing details about their websites, their keywords, about the topics which have been covered in their articles etc. Search engines used to give importance to websites having relevancy to a particular keyword, with the help of their meta tags. Thus, meta tags were used for ranking and positioning sites in SERP.
But, soon after knowing the fact, web-masters started abusing meta tags, in order to stand tall against their competition. People started “Stuffing Keywords” in their websites, just to get ranked for those meta keywords, even if their website is totally irrelevant to those tags. Thus it was simple “TRICK” to get top search engine ranking by stuffing irrelevant keywords in the site just to get on the top of SERP.
Later on, search engines including Lycos & AltaVista stopped supporting the meta keywords Tags. Similarly Google announced algorithm changes and penalized all those keyword stuffing websites by vanishing them from search engine results. Still meta tag is used to describe content to search engine and control indexing of the content of the website, as meta tags can be used for specifying whether a page should be indexed or not.
Impact of Meta Tag on Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.):
So, you will be asking,
“What are the recent criteria for doing successful on-page SEO and what’s the impact of meta tags on search engine ranking these days?”
As discussed earlier in the article, the meta tags were greatly abused and manipulated by webmasters, in order to SHOW crawlers that their website is the most relevant site to the targeted keyword. Thus after acknowledgement of the abuse and cheating, most of the search engine stopped relying on the meta tags keywords for checking relevancy. They added further criteria to assess a websites relevancy to a particular keyword.
But, still few search engines provide good response to proper meta tags these days.
You wonder, “Why?”
To understand this fact, you need to know a little bit about types of search engines. There are basically two types of search engines, one being Internal Search Engines, and others being Public Search Engines.
Both type of search engines uses different criteria and signals for providing search engine ranking and relevancy. Thus using meta keywords tags, works some time and fail to work other times, resulting in a more complicated SEO work for professionals and novice search engine optimizers.
Internal search engines still provide weight to meta keyword tags, after crawling your website, they provide ranking for relevant and proper meta keywords which are present in your pages. But, Public search engines such as Google, works on totally different algorithms and uses different criteria and signals to give weight to any website for relevancy to a keyword. All these meta tags keywords which are stuffed into the web pages on product review sites or MFA (Made for Adsense) sites, are present for benefit of the product vendors, not for the benefit of the end user or internet user, which is more important in the view of Google. Google has confirmed it in about each and every algorithm updates that they want to provide best and relevant results to global end users who are searching for any keyword on Google. Thus, Google don’t entertain such STUFFED keywords in a site and uses lot of other signals in order of deciding the relevancy of a website to particular search term.
Thus, adding proper meta tags could be a guidance for search engine crawlers to recognize the content of your site, but they will confirm it with other factors present in their algorithms. So, meta tag keywords are of intermediate importance in search engine optimization, and cannot force your website to first page of Google or any other search engine for any keyword, alone.
How to write perfect meta tags?
Finally, after going through all the introduction part and importance and significance of meta tags in the past, its misuse and all the cheating tricks, and finally losing its importance partially in recent days. You must be wondering, “how to write perfect meta tags?”, so that you can use the partial impact of meta tags on the relevancy of your website.
As we discussed earlier, meta tags give information about your site to search engine. Here are the meta tags which are used for search engine optimization:
1. Meta Title Tag:
Meta title tag is visible in the TOP of most of the browsers and in the tabs.
e.g. Check out our post on Website Design Rule, You will notice that Title tag “Small Business Website Design: Rules and Layout” is present in the top of the browser as well as in the tab of the browser, if you are using multi-tabbed browser.
Title tag is the most important factor of the website. This should be having your company name in it, as title tag can be used for Branding Your Business.
2. Meta Description Tag:
Description meta tag is another important factor which increase your CTR after getting high position in search ranking. When custom set, description tag is used to display as result description on the search engine page. This description will be in front of visitors every time your site shows in SERP, this description will decide whether a visitor click on your site link or goes to next result on the page. Again , a brilliant tool for getting targeted traffic.
Meta descriptions should not be having more than 40 words in it, and it should consist of your most important keywords which are relevant to your site. Again, relevancy is important, as you can get penalized by search engine resulting in your page showing at very low rank in SERP, just because of one small mistake of stuffing keywords not relevant to your website or putting a list of keywords in meta description.
3. Meta Keywords Tag:
Keywords tag is important in explaining the search engine about your page content. Every page of your site which need to be indexed, should be having different keyword tag. If every page of your site shows the same and repeated keywords, then search engine will consider it as “SPAM” of repeated keywords. Keywords placed in this tag, must be present in your article or content on that page. Again, using irrelevant keywords, or placing keywords which are not present in your content, can result in getting your site penalized or getting blacklisted, destroying all of your SEO efforts and dreams of getting FREE HIGHLY TARGETED TRAFFIC.
Additional tip:
- Targeted Keyword and Keyword phrase should be placed near the beginning of the Title, Description & Keyword tags.
- Try to keep the targeted keyword density approximately 4% to 5% in the content.
- Place main keyword and keyword phrase in the first paragraph of the page. The closer it appears, the better.
- Keep decent distance between repeated similar keywords, Don’t stuff similar keywords in single paragraph.
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