The Meta Tag Myth
By : Bobby Heard
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The more the better right? Wrong. At least when it comes to meta tags. The history of the meta tag started off as a nice tool that web sites could use to show the search engines what the site was about without the words showing up on the actual page. It seemed like a great idea until people started to abuse the meta tag. They would add highly searched for keywords that were unrelated to their site in their meta tags in hopes of attracting additional traffic. The search engines caught on and lowered the importance of meta tags - they figured out that if they put more emphasis on the visible content of a site, people would have a much more difficult time “cheating”. Turns out that they were right.
Now, don’t get me wrong, meta tags still do carry some significance. They need to be consistent with the content of your site, but most importantly they’re somewhat of a measure of the legitimacy of your site. The most common myth when it comes to search engine optimization is that the best meta tag is the one packed with the most information. This couldn't’t be further from the truth.
The keyword meta tag has been abused more than any other meta tag and does not carry as much importance as most of the others because of this reason. Most search engines only read the first few characters of the tag, if they read it at all, because they know that most keyword meta tags are filled with spam - Just the same words repeated over and over. That is why it’s important to get your most important keywords to the front of your keyword meta tag.
The meta tag that still carries the most importance is the description meta tag. This is because it serves as a description for the particular page of your site that it is included in. Description meta tags should be unique to each page of your site, as search engines frequently use it as the description under your page title that appears in the search results. Obviously, you want your description to be representative of the page being displayed.
So in conclusion, don’t use meta tags the way we all have a compulsive urge to - by packing it with everything that we can think of. It seems like a good idea, but it will only help you to fail in your goal of the holy grail: higher rankings.
Bobby Heard is the VP at Abalone Designs and is an active writer of SEO articles. More articles he has written are available at www.abalone.ca/resources/.
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