When creating your site, don’t neglect the importance of meta tags and their user and SEO effects.
There are three meta tags that you should certainly use:
- Title tag:
This may well be one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings. If possible, Title Tags should contain the specific keyword(s) or phrases you are looking to optimise for. As the words in the title tag are what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP), if they appear relevant, it may result in more clickthroughs. - Keywords tag:
Although it is probably the least important of the meta tags, it is still relevant to SEO and therefore it is good practice to populate this tag with the keyword(s) and/or phrases relevant to your site. The keywords should be listed in order of importance, separated by a comma. Remember to include variations of a keyword, but you must avoid repeating the same keywords as these will probably be treated as spam. - Description Tag:
These tags serve two purposes. They should utilise your keyword(s) and/or phrases, and they should help gain user clickthroughs from search engine result pages. Therefore direct relevance to the page and uniqueness between each page’s meta description is key. These descriptions should optimally be between 150-160 characters.
Whilst some Search Engines don’t consider meta tags when indexing or judging the contents of your website, meta tags are used by some search engines for the display of your web pages in their search results. The text snippet that you see below your page heading can be taken from your Meta Description.
