If you do a “view source” command from your browser and look at the code of someone’s website, you may find the above tag at the top of the source full of keywords relevant to the page you are looking at. These relevant keywords are called Meta Tags and are commonly used to distinguish the keywords that are relevant to a page’s content that you would like search engine’s to pick up.
You will see countless articles still instructing webmasters to make the importance of Meta Tags a priority but that has proven to be out-dated information. That is because in the early days of pre-Google, Meta Tag keywords were reasonably powerful tools for SEO. Meta Tags, combined with the keywords within a page, made up the main driving forces that dictated how high up a page would show up in search results.
The reality nowadays is that Meta Tag keywords are considered far from crucial for good SEO and if abused can even be bad for it. It is often seen that many websites really “keyword stuff” their source codes so that they have a higher ranking for more keywords under Google and other search engines. Many of these “keyword stuffing” sites hide more Meta-Tags within the site’s content with advanced coding or by using a text color the same as the background color. This strategy is frowned upon by search engines and if found, the site will be banned from all of the search engines all together.
The question still remains: Should I even worry about Meta Tags now?
The answer to that is yes and no. Do not prioritize using good Meta Tags when you have other larger SEO subjects to worry about. Your title tags, heading tags, and content play a much more important role. If you have time to spare to work on SEO, you should be writing great new content that people would link to rather than cramming your pages with redundant keywords.
If you insist on using Meta Tags, use them sparingly! You should only have about 10-keyword phrases maximum and make sure they are relevant to the page’s content.
Information Provided By: Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders