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The Role of Meta Tags in Your Site's SEO Success

Posted by: Tony Soric on Feb 12, 2010 2 Comments

At Clickable, our primary services focus on the world of paid search (PPC). While paid search is an extremely effective way to drive qualified traffic to your Web site, a well rounded search engine marketing (SEM) program should be complemented with a strong organic (free search results) presence.

I've put together a multi-part blog post series covering important aspects of SEO. If you are new to SEO, these tips will help you build a strong foundation for obtaining SEO traffic. For those of you who are more advanced in SEO, my hope is that you’ll pick up a tip or strategy that you aren't currently employing in your own SEO campaign.

In the first part of the series we’ll take a look at important on-page HTML elements that can influence your SEO rankings.

META tags
The META tags are arguably the most important on-page HTML elements when it comes to SEO. META tags consist of three tags that reside in the <head> of your HTML code and should be found at the very top of your page.

META title tag – The Title tag acts as, you guessed it – the title of the page in question. This tag helps the search bots understand the theme of your page. For those that are unfamiliar with search bots, bots are essentially scripts of code that the search engines use to crawl and identify Web pages that exist throughout the Internet. In the search engine results pages (SERPs), the title tag is the topmost hypertext link for each search result.

Title Tag Code: (Example)

<title>Apple - MacBook - The $999 notebook, completely redesigned.</title>

META Description tag – The Description tag also resides in the <head> tag of the HTML code. This tag surfaces in SERP results directly under the Title tag and offers you a space to elaborate on the page’s theme. Ideally, the Title and Description tags should follow each other thematically.

Description tag code: (example)

META Keywords tags – The Keywords tag has been largely ignored by the major search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN) bots for the last several years. In the early days of SEO, the spiders used this tag to help categorize sites and rank them based on keyword relevancy. As you can imagine, spammers took advantage of this loophole and keyword-stuffed this META tag with unrelated high-trafficked terms in order to increase their site traffic. (Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, etc.)

The keywords META tag does not appear in the SERP results (it only resides in the HTML code of your site). So should you completely ignore the Keywords META tag? It’s really up to you – some say there is no reason to neglect this META despite the bot’s propensity to ignore it (search engines tend to be fickle creatures, constantly changing their algorithms to thwart spamming attempts). If you are already making an effort to optimize your Title and Description tags, it will not hurt your site to optimize your Keywords tag as well.

Keyword tag code: (example)

<meta name="keywords" content="pay per click management, ppc software, google adwords, bid management, search marketing tool, ppc management, pay per click, internet marketing, search engine marketing" />

META tags play an important role in your site’s success with SEO, mainly by helping the bots identify the theme of your Web site. The key takeaway when setting up META tags is to remember to be concise and consistent (at the page level). Stay tuned for the next installment in this series.

This post is a summary of Tony’s article “Unloved But Still Important: How to Leverage Meta Tags” published on Search Engine Land by Third Door Media.

Tony Soric, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search-marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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The Role of Meta Tags in Your Site's SEO Success – The Official … | Drakz Free Online Service wrote:

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