If you’ve been floating around the search engine optimisation scene for more than five minutes, you’ll have discovered that there are two distinct schools of thought regarding meta tags: those who still live in 1997 and think meta tags will help your search engine rankings and those who mistakenly believe that meta tags can be ignored entirely. Unfortunately, they’re both wrong!
The fact of the matter is that meta tags ARE important in SEO, but not for reasons that you might think. Although meta tags will not directly help you rank for search terms, the incorrect use of meta tags will cause problems which may halt your progress dramatically. Always ensure that your meta keywords tag only contains terms which appear within that particular page. Anything more, and Google assumes you’re spamming. Make sure you keep to the character limits for each search engine, too – don’t just try to shove in as many keywords and as much relevant text as possible as you’ll be doing yourself a great disservice. The title tag is one of the most important aspects of on-page SEO: embrace it. Stick to fewer than 70 characters and make sure your keywords are placed prominently within it. Taking heed of these simple guidelines will certainly ensure long-lasting SEO success.
The long term future for meta tags is still unclear, whilst at the moment most experts believe it is still better to have it than not, whether Google and the other search engines actually take it into account anymore is increasingly doubtful. However even if it only plays a tiny role in the Search Engines algorithms then a benefit is still there to be had.
If you’re having issues with your meta tags, why not give us a call? We provide the expert SEO Wales has been looking for. We provide help and guidance on web design and search engine optimisation in Cardiff, Wales and the UK as a whole. Whether you’re having trouble with website design Cardiff or SEO in the UK, give us a call and we’ll be more than happy to help.