If you’ve had any SEO services marketed to you before, you’ve most likely seen the term “meta tags” before. If you have no idea what a meta tag is, this post is for you.
What’s a meta tag?
Meta tags refer to snippets of code in a web page that aren’t directly visible on the page itself. Meta tags help search engines understand the content of a page.
The two most important meta tags on any given page are the page title and page description. These two meta tags comprise the appearance of your page in search results. Think of them as the head and body of your search result; they’re what the user sees when your page appears in their search.
Being the intelligent business owner that you are, I’m sure you can see why these two meta tags are so important. They summarize what the user will see if they click on your link in their search results! Carefully-crafted page titles and page descriptions are an important step toward achieving a better page rank.
What about meta keywords?
Strike this term from your SEO vocabulary, because meta keywords are no longer relevant. Google stopped considering meta keywords for page ranks years ago.
One major reason search engines stopped considering this meta tag for ranking is because it is so easily (and frequently) abused by websites. Websites with worthless content used to dominate search results by cramming a bunch of keywords into this meta tag.
Scam SEO companies are still selling meta keywords as an optimization service, so avoid anyone who tries to sell you this worthless service.
Meta tags are a complex component of SEO
This only skims the surface of introducing you to meta tags. There are many other types of meta tags, and many more of them play important roles in search engine optimization. Configuring them improperly can hurt your page ranks, so leave this to skilled professionals!
