What are Meta Tags?
SEO Are Meta Tags Important? Are Meta tags at all still significant in SEO? Arguments abound in the world of search engine marketing and this is often a subject that sparks a lot of debate. Not surprisingly, Meta data is often something that a lot of people tend to misunderstand.
Now in the early years of web marketing, search engine optimisation only revolved around technical data such as title tags, keywords and yes, Meta tag which can be collectively referred today as on page SEO. Search engines back then were at its infancy and did not yet possess the kind of algorithms that they implement today in assessing relevance and quality.
Eventually, search engines evolved and ultimately decided to factor in other factors such as the number and quality of links pointing to a website. Such links are perceived by search engines as a “vote of confidence” that goes towards the quality and relevance of a particular website. The idea is that if there are a lot of good websites linking themselves to yours then you must have something of value to offer search engine users.
Thus ended the trend of on-page SEO and caused a lot of people to dismiss meta tags as unimportant which simply just isn’t true!
Meta Tags are still important in SEO
A lot of people in the search engine marketing business today are not paying any attention to on-page SEO and that can end up costing them dearly. A number of businesses with successful and high ranking websites may even claim that they don’t bother with Meta data in their online marketing campaign. Again this isn’t really true and just because they’ve said so doesn’t mean that your business has to follow suit.
Think about this for a moment – in various SEO studies covering the use of Meta tag, websites that make good and proper use of Meta data tend to fare better in search engine rankings compared to others that don’t. More importantly, the use of these tags enables business websites to specify which information to reveal whenever their website shows up in search engine page results. Without Meta data, you are letting search engines decide what text to show on your website link which might not be convincing enough for users to click on.
Indeed the use of Meta tags still remains a significant factor in SEO and it is certainly smart to make good use of it if only for the reason that it allows website owners to control what information search engines would show along with the link to your website!
