Over the past 12 months there have been many changes to the major search engines and the way in which they now perceive and read meta tags on a site. This has led to many people now using antiquated techniques as there are hundreds of blogs and sites with information from many moons ago advising to use these outmoded methods.

With that in mind I felt it would be useful to bring all of the relevant information together to ensure everyone is aware of the best practices for meta tag optimisation as this is one area of search engine optimisation that everyone likes to pay attention to.

Keyword Meta Tag

All 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo & Bing have each released information that confirms that even if they do still index the keyword meta tag that they do all pay little if any attention to this particular bit of information. The only reason that this would now be used is to rank a page for an extremely uncompetitive term that is not being targeted elsewhere on the net. With this information in mind there is certainly no issue with sites still using this tag and in my opinion it is still useful as an internal tool to demonstrate what the rest of the page is looking to target but bear in mind that it will not have any direct effect on your rankings.

Description Meta Tag

During the discussion on the keywords tag, Google’s webmaster blog also mentioned that they do not use the description meta either as part of its ranking procedure. Yahoo and Bing have been less vocal on this point but all 3 search engines do still tend to utilise the description tag as the main body of the listing in their result pages providing it is relevant to the users search term.

Based on this information I would strongly recommend that you spend some time on your description tags to ensure that have a strong call to action that is likely to pull the user into your site but to also back this up by utilising the major keyword phrases within this text as any search terms that are listed in the description tag will be bolded which will again draw the user’s eyes to the listing. This is in essence now a very similar process to writing effective ad text for PPC adverts and in my opinion this is a good framework to follow.

Title Meta Tag

The title tag is still the major element that all 3 leading search engines still use not only to list sites in their ranking pages but also as a ranking factor. The amount of authority the title tag actually has in the entire ranking process may well be deemed as very little in comparison to links pointing to the site for example but in my opinion this fact doesn’t allude to the title tags comparative importance. Whilst amending this element alone is unlikely to make any great in roads to the upper echelons of the ranking results, it is equally unlikely that your well linked site will rank correctly without having the title tag optimised correctly.

Ultimately the title tag is exactly that, a title for the page that describes what is on the page. It will be read by both search engine spiders and users alike and should therefore be simple but descriptive and should include major search terms related to the content on the page.

Many people may feel that this information is common knowledge these days but it is the subtle changes to this process that have evolved over the past 12 months that can be the difference to your sites rankings and just as importantly to the click through rate of users through to your site.

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