Meta Tags and Meta Tags Advice

Do the search engines read meta tags anymore?

An article looking at the importance of meta tags in search engine optimization and how search engines view these meta tags.

First of all, a quick definition of the term "meta tag". A meta tag is essentially the descriptive text you supply for each and every page on your website.

It's a short piece of text, usually around 150 characters, which tells the search engine robots what they can expect to find on your page.

It's also the text that shows up beneath your listing in the search engine results.

Increasingly, search engines seem to be ignoring meta tags and instead relying on text they find on your website to generate their own descriptions of your pages.

I still believe in making things as clear as possible for search engines, so I always include meta tags for all the pages on my websites.

What I tend to do is match the first lines of text in my webpages to the meta tags, so for this page I would use the bold text at the top as my meta tag, so my meta tag would read:

"An article looking at the importance of meta tags in search engine optimization and how search engines view these meta tags"

Without the quotes of course.

Notice I've got my keyword in twice (meta tags) which will make my page more attractive to the search engines and also give me more highlighted text in the search engine listings.

Anybody doing a search for "meta tags" would see the listing for my page as follows:

Meta Tags and Meta Tags Advice
An article looking at the importance of meta tags in search engine optimization and how search engines view these meta tags

No need to click the link - it only leads back to this page !!!

Notice I've got my keyword in twice in the title and twice in the meta tag. I call this effect "double bubble" and it makes a big difference to your rankings. Try it and see.

Doing it this way, gives me more control over the descriptions surfers will see on my website listings, replicating what the search engines will probably decide is the most suitable description of my page anyway and giving it to them in advance.

Work with what the engines want or expect to see. It's the best way to move up the rankings.