The Importance Of Meta Details

As i go about my day performing search engine optimisation on peoples websites i have contact with a lot of people including third party people who may be involved with a website we work on. Now today i was told by a 3rd party that optimising meta tags is “old Hat” and that Google places no relevance on what is found here.

I thought id write about this as some people obviously have this train of thought. To put it simply Yes, meta tags are still used by search engines and DO still hold relevance. When i speak of meta tags i talk off the title, keywords and description tags. If you have optimised meta tags then do a search for your domain in Google; what do you see? you will see the title of the web page as the title of the search result and the description on the web page as the snipped in the search results. Good optimised sites always have their keywords in these areas and when you search for the keyword Google makes the keyword bold in the results. I don’t know about you but if i see the keyword in the title and description in the search results i click that link!

Secondly as all good SEO’s know for Google to return your page as a search result there has to be relevance on the page to the search query. One of the first things Google reads when it looks at the page is the title, keywords and description.

I will agree with one thing though, Google does not place to much relevance on the keywords. This is because in the past? people have tried to take advantage of this and stuff keywords into the keywords tag. The other tags however have a physical limit on how many characters will be recognised so cant be stuffed. You could still try and cram as many keywords as possible in these tags but Google is clever enough to see if you are doing this and if you are they simple take the title and snipped from elsewhere. Simply put your meta tags tell Google what your page is about.

Gary
NSEO Programmer

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1 Comment

1. Dear Gary,

   Thanks for the interesting article.

   We are currently reviewing our website here at London Registrars.

   One of our standard search terms is “Forming a Limited Company” or “Company Formation”. A Google search of those terms throws up thousands of hits and we are not even in the first fifteen pages. We therefore stand no chance of being noticed by anyone searching using Google. What do we do?

   In a sense we are not that worried about our position because the websites that do come high up on the natural (or is it organic) listings on Google are offering a low-cost Company Incorporation service - say ?29.00 + VAT. We are not really in that market as we offer a high quality, personal service.

   But we would still like to be able to use the standard search terms and get some hits.

   Any ideas?

   Kind regards,

   Bryan Dunne
   Marketing Manager
   London Registrars ltd

   Comment by Bryan Dunne - London Registrars July 2, 2008 @ 2:18 pm

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