Earlier this month, we published our first in the series of Video SEO Tips. If you’re unaware of Video SEO, it is effectively the method of optimising an online video to be more SEO Friendly, helping popular Search Engines index its content within its rankings and media search services, such as Google Video.

This week, Nick Rinylo speaks about the Importance of Meta Data and how it can be considered when distributing your online videos in-conjunction with a Video SEO Campaign.

It has been a been a well-known fact that over the last 10 years search engines have been using meta tags less and less to decide a website’s ranking. So do we still need them? Is it just wasting our time typing in all those keywords and custom descriptions for each page of your website?

It’s true that Meta tags have a lot less significance to what they did 10 years ago and by not adding them doesn’t mean your site will not be ranked. However even though the search engines do not solely rely on the Meta data to determine a ranking they do still use the Meta data to help assist in the ranking your web site. My answer is “Yes” and below are the minimum meta tags that I believe should be on every website.

Keywords

The keywords tag was designed for the web designer to choose which keywords the website would rank in. This was found unreliable due to many web designers not filling it correctly while other web designers were abusing the tag by using methods to increase their website above more relevant websites.

So should I ignore this tag altogether? Well no! even though Google has confirmed that it no longer uses the keywords tag many other search engines (including Yahoo) still use the tag to assist them in choosing keywords for your website.

There has never been an official limit on the amount of keywords you can add to the keywords attribute although most search engines recommend between 25-30 keywords.

Description

The Description attribute tag unlike the keywords attribute tag is still used by all the major search engines. It is mainly used as a fall-back option for when a search engine is unable to find a suitable description elsewhere on the website. This tag is definitely a must for your website and by not adding the description tag you would be losing valuable SEO.

Again there is no official limit to the amount of characters you can use in your description tag but most search engines recommend the description tag is shorter than 200 characters.

Distribution

This distribution tag tells search engines whether your website is for global distribution (Global), local distribution (local) or internal use (IU). Even though almost all the search engines will automatically default to global if the tag is missing it is still worth putting the tag in just in case your website is indexed by a search engine that does require it.

Language & Content Language

These 2 tags essentially do the same thing. If your website is designed using any non-US English language it will tell the search engine exactly what language your website is using and will in turn help your website to get indexed properly.

Content Type

Although this tag has no direct effect on your SEO results it is still worth a mention because this tag is used to tell the search engine which character set your page is using and will stop any character errors being shown while google is crawling your site.

So there you have it. Meta tags are still used and are still are an important part of your SEO. There are many other optional meta tags available but if you do want your website at the top of Google then giving them every extra little bit of data through meta tags can only help your website ranking.

YouTube Channel = http://www.youtube.com/crearecomm

Script:

Nick: Hi and welcome to ‘what are meta tags’, my name is Nick and I am currently an SEO developer for Creare Communications, I am joined by my colleague James who is a web designer also from creare.

James: Hello

Nick: We intend to discuss the SEO, design and marketing aspects of Meta Tags.

Nick: The META element provides metadata such as a document’s keywords, description, and author. Any number of META elements may be contained in the <head> of a document.

James: So, Meta tags have various purposes, today we often see them used by SEO companies to promote keywords behind the scenes of a website. But from a design point of view, clients can often see their meta description in the Search Engine results page or SERP . This means it is important that they are legible and most importantly that they make sense.

Nick: This is an important point because often bespoke content management systems are sometimes designed to generate meta keyword and meta description tags automatically from a page titles, tags or similar, This often means that they make little sense and are not user or search friendly.

Nick: Historically Meta tags used to hold a lot of weight and were vital for internal optimisation, it was exploited by optimisers and Google had to evolve their algorithm as to prevent this from happening, Google now takes into consideration a wide range of different variables designed to keep optimisers guessing.

James: Although we are saying that meta data is no longer a vital SEO asset, we still believe its worth adding them in for alternatives to Google and as previously mentioned the description tag is shown in the search results by all search engines including Google, meaning you can use this opportunity to connect with your user and write something to attract people to click your listing.

James: We like to traditionally use the following tags:
<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” /> - <meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” /> -
<meta name=”description” content=”" /> -<meta name=”keywords” content=”" /> 
<meta name=”author” content=” ” /> - <meta name=”copyright” content=”" />

Nick: So lets concentrate on the 2 most important tags, the meta keyword and meta description tag.

James: The Keywords tag is traditionally a list of keywords that you want your site to appear for in a search query.

Nick: I think the most important aspect to consider when writing a keyword tag is to be consistent with the rest of the internal optimisation on your site, so the search engine can see that your content reflects your chosen keywords.

James: As an example is we wanted to optimise for
•    air conditioning
•    commercial air conditioning
•    conditioning maintenance
You would separate each phrases and word with a comma as shown.
“Air conditioning, Commercial Air Conditioning, Air Conditioning Maintenance, Air, Conditioning, Maintenance, Commercial”

Nick: The description tag is similar, it will include all your key words but you also have to consider the way it reads and whether it catches the publics imagination. I would suggest that you include your clients company name and even the area that they are based in the meta description, This was users can immediately see whether the company fits their needs and location.

For example is you were to use the air conditioning keywords mentioned before you would write something like:
“’Your Company Name’ provides commercial air conditioning solutions throughout the UK, We also provide a maintenance and repair service for any air conditioning units that we supply.”

James: Despite the fact they no longer hold the weight as they previously did, they should not be overlooked. Any respectable web design or Search Engine Optimisation company should use meta data to its full potential.

Nick: We will be releasing similar videos in weeks to come both on Web design and Search Engine Optimisation. You can subscribe to our RSS feed or Subscribe to our youtube channel at youtube.com/crearecomm. Thanks For Watching.