It has been a been a well-known fact that over the last 10 years search engines have been using meta tags less and less to decide a website’s ranking. So do we still need them? Is it just wasting our time typing in all those keywords and custom descriptions for each page of your website?

It’s true that Meta tags have a lot less significance to what they did 10 years ago and by not adding them doesn’t mean your site will not be ranked. However even though the search engines do not solely rely on the Meta data to determine a ranking they do still use the Meta data to help assist in the ranking your web site. My answer is “Yes” and below are the minimum meta tags that I believe should be on every website.

Keywords

The keywords tag was designed for the web designer to choose which keywords the website would rank in. This was found unreliable due to many web designers not filling it correctly while other web designers were abusing the tag by using methods to increase their website above more relevant websites.

So should I ignore this tag altogether? Well no! even though Google has confirmed that it no longer uses the keywords tag many other search engines (including Yahoo) still use the tag to assist them in choosing keywords for your website.

There has never been an official limit on the amount of keywords you can add to the keywords attribute although most search engines recommend between 25-30 keywords.

Description

The Description attribute tag unlike the keywords attribute tag is still used by all the major search engines. It is mainly used as a fall-back option for when a search engine is unable to find a suitable description elsewhere on the website. This tag is definitely a must for your website and by not adding the description tag you would be losing valuable SEO.

Again there is no official limit to the amount of characters you can use in your description tag but most search engines recommend the description tag is shorter than 200 characters.

Distribution

This distribution tag tells search engines whether your website is for global distribution (Global), local distribution (local) or internal use (IU). Even though almost all the search engines will automatically default to global if the tag is missing it is still worth putting the tag in just in case your website is indexed by a search engine that does require it.

Language & Content Language

These 2 tags essentially do the same thing. If your website is designed using any non-US English language it will tell the search engine exactly what language your website is using and will in turn help your website to get indexed properly.

Content Type

Although this tag has no direct effect on your SEO results it is still worth a mention because this tag is used to tell the search engine which character set your page is using and will stop any character errors being shown while google is crawling your site.

So there you have it. Meta tags are still used and are still are an important part of your SEO. There are many other optional meta tags available but if you do want your website at the top of Google then giving them every extra little bit of data through meta tags can only help your website ranking.

What are meta tags? You may have heard people mention them before, but you don’t really know what they are or what they do. This article will attempt to help you to understand the importance of meta tags, and their uses in search engine optimisation.

Lets start with a definition of what a basic meta tag is. A meta tag is a line of code on a website that shows certain information to the people who are looking at the page, and also to search engines that are trying to put the page in the correct place.

When looking at Search Engine Optimisation, the most important meta tag is :-

<meta name=”description” content=”A blurb to describe the content of the page appears here” />

An example of this that you might find on a website would be

<meta name=”description” content=” A Blogs plumbing offer a range of plumbing solutions in London and surrounding areas”/>

This information here would be visible when you search for a site in the SERP (search engine result positions).

If you typed “Air conditioning” into a search engine. Here’s an example of what you would see

The middle part here is the meta description. This short description shows what the company does, and what products they offer. Information like this makes it easy for search engine users to decide if they have found the site that they are looking for, as well as indicating to the search engine what the contents of the site are.

Other meta tags are also often incorporated into websites, giving the search engine different information. Examples of this can be :-

<meta name=”distribution” content=”Global” />
Shows the search engine that the site is to be available to anyone in the world to view.

<meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids” />
The content in this site does not contain adult information.

<meta name=”author” content=”Creare Communications ” />
The author of the page is the company mentioned.

If you want any more information regarding meta tags, simply drop us a comment.