Meta tags – what are they good for?

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When it comes to optimising your website, there are some pretty easy to follow guidelines to boosting your placement on Google. In a nutshell it boils down to ‘get more in bound links from relevant third party websites’ and ‘create more relevant content for your own website’. The key words for both of these things, of course, being ‘relevant’.

However, if it really was that simple, then the whole search engine optimisation (SEO) industry wouldn’t exist and, Black Hat techniques aside, there are quite a few intricacies that you need to understand to optimise in a competitive market, such as insurance, travel or broadband.

One of those that’s confused me for a while is meta tags, especially the keywords. Meta tag keywords and descriptions help search engines decide what your website is about. If you Right Click on your site and ‘View Source’ you’ll see what these currently are. If you look at my blog’s tags and see the Google results for “technology pr blog” you’ll see that, along with my title tag <title>, my meta tags appear to play a role in appearing at the top of Google*.

However, a couple of SEO people have told me that meta keywords don’t matter and that it’s other things, like the title tag, that are more important. As many people will tell you, Google tweaks its algorithms regularly, so I thought I’d get a second opinion from the SEO community.

I asked:

“I hear conflicting advice about Metatags, both descriptions and keywords, with some people saying they’re important, others saying Google doesn’t take any notice of them.”

SEO expert Jon Stephenson responded:

“I will say both are true. they are important and google doesn’t take any notice of them (for ranking). The keyword tag is dead due to spammers and has been for years but the description tag is still good to help with conversion. The first half of getting good traffic is being ranked well on the search engine results the second half is to get people to click on the link. The description tag is picked up by Google and other crawlers and used as the description on the results page below the link to your site. So although this won’t help you in ranking it will help drive more users to your site.”

Another SEO consultant, Greg Parsons, added:

“Use the description tag to get a very clear, concise description of your page into the SERPs to assist the surfer in making a choice to click your site rather than the others. We usually try to keep it ~150 characters or so, and make sure the description tags, if used, are unique across all pages of your site. Don’t bother using the meta keywords and meta descriptions tag for SEO, although, as you mentioned you will hear conflicting opinions on that. We’ve ran tests and found no conclusive evidence that these meta tags help in SEO efforts. Use them as an aid for your user if anything, rather than an aid for SEO purposes. Meta keywords can be useful to someone, somewhere, somehow, I’m sure…but not in the engines.”

If you have a look at the discussion thread, you’ll see that some people disagree and reckon that meta tags and descriptions are vitally important – and instinctively I feel they’re right, but apparently not so. Google clarify matters on the Webmaster Central blog with an explanation of meta descriptions, (though not meta keywords):

“We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it’s worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t affect your ranking within search results.”

So, there you have it. Despite continued confusion in the SEO community, it seems that spending ages optimising meta tags does not improve your search engine ranking – at least when it comes to Google.

* The results Google serves are dynamic and change regularly – for example, my placement for “technology PR blog” varies considerably. There are many many factors that determine your where your sites appears on Google and other search engines, but for simplicity this post focuses on meta tags.

Tagged as: google, meta tags, search engine optimization