Most of us know that the major search engines pretty much ignore what’s in the meta description tag when it comes to ranking your site but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it completely. It now serves a very important – albeit slightly different – purpose.

Back in the day, meta tags were used to help the search engines work out what your website was about and rank your site based on how relevant it thought it was top the search being performed.

These days it is much less of a ranking factor, but is instead used to describe what your website is about within the search results, as seen below:

Google search results for an 'SEO' search showing snippets taken from the meta description tag

Although it doesn’t have an effect on your rankings within the search results, you should still put some time and effort into creating a good description that grabs interest.

Use it to attract visitors that may otherwise skip over your positions within the search results, particularly if you aren’t quite at positions #1. I don’t mean fill it with crazy characters, but make it salesy. Grab attention and pull people onto your site.

Think about what makes you unique. If you are cheap then includes prices. If you are the only supplier, make sure you include that along with what you do and what you offer. If potential visitors aren’t sure what you do after reading your snippet of text within the search results then they aren’t as likely to click onto your site and not only are potential sales lost, but the hard work that’s going into your SEO campaign is being wasted.

If Google finds that your meta description tag doesn’t describe your site accurately or informatively it will choose to pull search snippets from elsewhere, including the content on the page and external sites such as the DMOZ and Yahoo directories if they fit the bill better.

Top Tips:

• Keep your meta description tag to less than 150 characters. 100-150 is a good guideline.
• Make it precise but informative
• Grab attention with your description while getting across important details in a few words as possible.
• Include keywords. Although they don’t affect your rankings the keywords you search for are highlighted within the search results, helping your listing to stand out and spear relevant to the users search.

If Left to their own methods, search engine spiders could potentially perceive important pages as unimportant, index content that we don’t wish to serve as a user entry point and several other issues. As such, there are two things to explore in this post and their pros and cons. They are the robots.txt file and the canonical link element.

Robots.txt does allow a certain amount of control over search engine access to a web page but it does not guarantee that the search engine will not index the page. I think the general consensus is that it should only really be used when necessary. It is generally thought that it is more beneficial just to have the robots.txt file there to indicate full access rather than have anything restricted. If there is a page that must be kept out of the index, the ‘noindex’ meta tag is the alternative to go for. However another pro is that files can be restricted from the xml sitemap, making it a very easy file to use.

Being easy to use can also be detrimental as this can lead to misuse of this file. I have personally seen that it is too easy for people to restrict a file in robots.txt than address the issue in question. Most of the time, the issue is duplicate content and this could in most cases be resolved without using the robots.txt file. Another downside to use of robots.txt is that it also blocks inbound link juice. Inbound links to the blocked page might have some benefit to the domain overall but it is certainly not being used to its full potential. In addition to that, there is a missed opportunity for internal link value from the blocked page to other important pages.

The canonical tag is simply a page level meta tag that shows the search engines which is the canonical version of the web page being displayed. In essence, showing them which version of the page we want them to look at. I have come across this occasionally when the .htaccess file is not working or not compatible with the server. This file would essentially redirect back to the version of the webpage we want to be displayed. Being redirected properly strengthens any SEO because it will then not be diluted between 4 versions of the same web page. The canonical link element does consolidate your page strength into the one canonical version but again, it does not solve the underlying problem. It is also more of a signal to search engines rather than a command and let’s not forget that it can be very easy to implement incorrectly.

In summary, although these methods exist as a solution, it would be much more beneficial to get to the root of the problem and solve it ourselves without resorting to these methods. For example, we need to try and remove duplicate content ourselves and work to get a website up to standard without resorting to restricting within the robots.txt file. Having a file set to ‘allow’ invites search engines to index all files in the xml sitemap. Regarding .htaccess, let’s get to the root cause of why this file won’t work or is not compatible. If the site is hosted externally, research the hosting company and find out how we can make it compatible. This is how we better ourselves and develop our abilities. We should be embracing the opportunity to expand our knowledge and skills.

As a relative newcomer to the world of SEO towards the end of last year, the rate of the learning curve has been immense. I put this down to the fact that I was a complete beginner not even knowing what SEO was! As such, most things that I come across are new and exciting to me. In this post I would like to write about a basic but very useful tool. You will see that its use lies mainly in the visible prediction of a Google SERP.

I came across a site very recently that not only provides a count of the characters in the most important meta tags (title and description) it also gives you a preview of what the Google listing would look like. As we know, Google tends to cut off the title after about 70 characters so it is good practice to have a limit and prioritise it as a resource for the primary keywords. The meta description should also be keyword rich but be much more descriptive and relevant to the business and web page it is written for. Google will cut off meta descriptions after 150 characters leaving ‘…’ which looks a lot less professional. Again, to stick within the limit could improve the click through rate if a user can simply read a description that doesn’t appear to be half missing.

I have found the snippet optimization tool useful when having to add optimisation to a website at the beginning of an SEO campaign. It is also invaluable as a tool to check the standards of existing sites and finding areas of the internal SEO that could be improved upon. I have used it just to copy and paste the content of the meta tags from an older site to check how it looks and whether the number of character needs reducing.

In the example from an older existing site, I found that some of these meta tags on optimised pages did not meet these standards. I made a small adjustment to the page <title> so that it made best use of the primary keywords and was within the character limit. The campaign has changed a little more recently and changes in search volumes made the priority of keywords change. I had to reflect this internally in the website. I also updated the meta description so that it was more fitting to the business as it is now, met the limit of characters and made best use of the keywords. The result of this was an increase of two positions in the rankings and well worth doing.

I hope that you take away something of a refresher. For other fellow newcomers, I hope you find it useful to use as you progress. I have enjoyed having something to write about as someone who has only commented until now.

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.

What are meta tags? You may have heard people mention them before, but you don’t really know what they are or what they do. This article will attempt to help you to understand the importance of meta tags, and their uses in search engine optimisation.

Lets start with a definition of what a basic meta tag is. A meta tag is a line of code on a website that shows certain information to the people who are looking at the page, and also to search engines that are trying to put the page in the correct place.

When looking at Search Engine Optimisation, the most important meta tag is :-

<meta name=”description” content=”A blurb to describe the content of the page appears here” />

An example of this that you might find on a website would be

<meta name=”description” content=” A Blogs plumbing offer a range of plumbing solutions in London and surrounding areas”/>

This information here would be visible when you search for a site in the SERP (search engine result positions).

If you typed “Air conditioning” into a search engine. Here’s an example of what you would see

The middle part here is the meta description. This short description shows what the company does, and what products they offer. Information like this makes it easy for search engine users to decide if they have found the site that they are looking for, as well as indicating to the search engine what the contents of the site are.

Other meta tags are also often incorporated into websites, giving the search engine different information. Examples of this can be :-

<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” />
Shows the search engine that the site is to be available to anyone in the world to view.

<meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” />
The content in this site does not contain adult information.

<meta name=”author” content=”Creare Communications ” />
The author of the page is the company mentioned.

If you want any more information regarding meta tags, simply drop us a comment.