SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is one of the key steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting a high-traffic website. Freeing you from spending thousands of dollars on advertising and promotion, SEO allows you to grow your traffic organically with the help of page rankings. What many web designers learn only after much experience, however, is the difference meta tags make in how your pages rank.
No aspect of SEO is more frequently overlooked than making sure that meta tags are used on every page. Meta tags, which are invisible to visitors, give the search engines specific identifiers for the page. Many site owners never implement them to full effect.
There are different kinds of meta tags that impact SEO. Take, for instance, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag provides a list of keywords to spiders, telling them what the website is all about. If you visit NYTimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Page Source,” you will find a meta tag about half down the first page reading META KEYWORDS. This tag will show you a long list of keywords starting with “New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, national news?” and so on. The keyword list contains dozens of words that relate to this particular paper but also to papers in general.
Most search engines pick up these keywords from content, too, but it can help to include keywords that are little-used in text, especially odd spellings of names and places, related topics, and anything else you have trouble placing in your content in a user-friendly way.
The second critical meta tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. Search engines use this tag to display information about your site when in search results. Most search engines allow 160 characters in this meta tag. The META DESCRIPTION tag is also a place you may include keywords that boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.
There are other meta tags, but these two are the most vital to effective SEO. It is critical that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not stuff them full of words not related to your content. And, of course, it is important not to use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Excessive keyword density, like putting in too many keywords on a page, will cause the search engines to mark your pages as spam.
Finally, be sure to use different meta tags on every page. You should target tags to the content included on that particular page. If you repeat meta tags through your site, you will not benefit from valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.
This type of Outsourcing Strategy really has a competitive effect of one's website. Creating a traffic and boosts its rank to the top.
The truth about the metatags mentioned in the article above is that some search engines have stated publicly that due to the potential for spam like activity, they ignore some or all metatags.
One of these is Google. They claim to be ignoring the metatag keywords and using metatag descriptions only when they are unable to find anything else suitable on the page that describes the page content.
So the rule of thumb is, don't obsess about metatags but ensure that your metatag description is benefit laden ( for a potential customer ) and something that people might want to click on, just in case a search engine decides to use it in the search engine results page (serps)
Google has been known in the past to take serp descriptions from either alexa registrations or entries found in dmoz.org
There is in fact a metatag to tell google not to use the Dmoz.org description – important since dmoz tends to have the most outdated information anyway…