With so many different elements of a page counting towards its SEO, it can often be hard for a layperson to get things straight. In fact, if you listen to even half of the arguments bandied around the SEO community, it’s hard for even SEO experts to get things straight. Still, it’s important for the average business to have a rudimentary understanding of what is, and is not, important to their site’s search engine optimisation.

There are a few different kinds of tags that are of importance to your site’s search engine optimisation. Meta tags are of varied importance, depending on who you listen to. Content tags seem to be rising in importance along with the social media networks that make thorough use of them. Both sorts of tags should be included in your search engine optimisation strategy.

The search engines once used meta tags to find out what a site was about. These tags provided a sort of short cut for the search engine spiders when crawling sites. From about the point when SEO companies realised the value of meta tags, search engines altered their strategies to provide more organic results. Since then, the tags have lessened in importance, although they are still an element worth considering when it comes to your site’s SEO.

Take the meta description tag, for example. It’s thought that search engines pay little attention to this tag, using it as the blurb that sits under your site’s link in the SERPs but nothing more. However, when you consider that this blurb is the most information users have for your site, apart from your place in the results and your title, the meta description tag takes on more importance. It is the one area you can use to really sell your site directly to the user.

The title tag is similarly important. This tag is created in a page’s ‘head’ area, just above the meta tags. It creates the header at the very top of the screen, which helps users to identify where they are in your site. Most browsers use a page’s title tag as the bookmark listing whenever a user bookmarks it. The text in your title tag is also displayed in search results and plays a part in your ranking. Title tags should incorporate the page’s major keywords, but also describe the page in 10 words or less, which is a tricky task.

It seems that the meta keywords tag is completely out, now that Yahoo!, the last search engine to consider it, have admitted to excluding it from their algorithms. The search engines are understandably wary of any element that can be as easily abused as tags. This is partly why the meta keyword tag died so ignominious a death. So many sites stuffed irrelevant keywords into the tag that it was rendered useless. The remaining tags count in some way toward the user’s experience and so have survived.

The formulation of tags is one of the areas in which most businesses approach an SEO consultant. While SEO can be done within a business, it is a specialist field that benefits from experience. If your business needs advice on SEO tags and website optimisation, talk to our experts at SEO Consult.

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