How important are meta tags? Do they play any role in your search engine optimization success? Yes they do, and we’ll tell you why.
In this Video:
00:12 – Two Types of Meta Tags
00:26 – Meta Keywords Don’t Count
01:01 – Desirable Keywords
01:31 – The Money is With Meta Descriptions
01:54 – Think About Your Meta Description Well
02:07 – Include Your Target Keyword
02:23 – Compelling Description Says It All
02:47 – High Level Strategies
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Okay, so in this week’s training I’m going to answer the question, “How important are meta tags for successful SEO Results?”
In order to answer that question let me first distinguish between the two types of Meta tags. Firstly you have the Meta keywords and secondary, you have Meta description. In terms of Meta keywords, I will not put any of your energy here. Google themselves have told us that they don’t count Meta keywords, in fact, none of the search engines count Meta keywords in terms of ranking factors. And that’s because historically website owners will just try and spam in as many keywords as they could in the Meta keyword tag in the hope that they might pick up some rank. And of course that’s a good thing because there’s no reason why Company A couldn’t just place Company B’s name on their Meta keywords and pick up some rank for that key phrase if Google indeed did count that towards search engine rank.
Whilst I say that you should spend little time on Meta keywords, I do recommend that you should actually complete the Meta keyword tags. Put in about 6 – 8 phrases that really summarize the content on your page and help Google really determine what that page is about. As I said, they don’t count at all towards search engine rank but because it is good SEO practice I do think that if you have a bit of spare time left over whilst managing your SEO campaign, it is a good box to tick off.
The Meta Description tag on the other hand is where you should be spending a fair bit of your time. When you’ve got a valuable, useful Meta description and Google see it as being relevant to a search term being placed in to a search engine by a user, they potentially will show that snippet of text within the search results. So a little bit like a display advert, you should be giving some thought to what your Meta description says because it will show up in the results and will influence whether someone clicks on your results or your competitor’s.
My advice for the Meta description is to include the keyword phrase you want to target. When the searcher places a search within the search engine and then sees the result with the keyword phrase they’ve just typed in shown, it will increase the likelihood that they’ll click on that result.
Over and above that, you want to make your description compelling, make it sales worthy and enticing, and where possible, describe the content on the page they’re going to click through to; because there is nothing worse than reading a description that says one thing, perhaps talks about red widgets and then lands on a page that talks about bananas. People are not going to stick around on that page, they’re going to click back and go to another result.
My last piece of advice if you really want to go high level strategy is to test different Meta descriptions. Perhaps you want to test within a period with Meta description A and then reverse it out for Meta description B and see which gets you the best click through rate, super high level strategy but if you’re really spending time on your on page SEO, it will really, really pay off.
This has been James Reynolds with another training video, if you want to get more videos like this, head on over to Veravo.com. See you soon!
