Ianmaco's Blog

To MetaTag or not to MetaTag, that is the question… March 16, 2010

There seems to be a lot of indecision about metatags on websites. Many website developers are of the opinion that website metatags have no value for search engine spiders. In my opinion, this could not be further from the truth.

Metatags are essential for spiders to get valuable information about your website. Since the internet is about information then, logically, a website should offer as much “invisible” information as possible. When the spiders crawl your website, they pick up the information from the source code and relay that info back to the search engine itself. Metatags provide invaluable information for this purpose.

The Title metatags provide the search engine with the actual heading of your listing. Without a title metatag, the listing simply shows your URL, eg. “http://yourwebsite.com” which is confusing to the visitor and they will tend to look at the next listing, which has a decent title.

The Description metatag provides the information about your website immediately below the title on the search engine page. With no description metatag, the spiders simply grab the first 150 or so characters from your webpage and display that. If it happens to be menu items, then that is what will be displayed, confusing the visitor once again.

The Keywords metatag is important from an optimization perspective and allows you to cater for not your desired keywords, but also misspelled keywords. Populating the keywords metatag with keyword variations and incorrect spellings will improve your chances of ranking on the search engine for a wider range of user search terms.

A word of caution on the keywords metatag: do not repeat keywords unless they are contained in separate keyword phrase. For example, “drilling machine”, “machine tools”, “boring machine” is acceptable; “machine”, “machine”, “machine” is DEFINITELY NOT acceptable and is classed by search engines as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing will get you slapped off the search engine before you can say “Google”! And once you have had the slap, getting back can be described as nearly impossible. You have been warned.

In conclusion, use metatags as they will provide the search engines and, ultimately, visitors the information you want them to know about. The major search engines all provide useful guidelines on the correct application of metatags, so look it up and apply it.

I would like to hear your ideas on this subject.

Cheers for now…

Wizard Marketing