Do Meta tags Matter These Days?

There used to be a time when all you had to do was mention the keyword you wanted to rank for as many times on a page as possible, even going as far as to hide the text as the same color as the background just to fit more in. The days of this working are long gone, and even stuffing within the normal text on the page is picked up easily by Google these days. So are something as old as meta tags still important in this day and age of SEO and Web-design. In short – yes, but not all of them.

Title tag

The title tag is still very important to web design, it will come up in searches as the clickable link, and while Google have taken to changing and adapting your title tag as they see fit, it is still important to get a good title in place. This should be relevant to your page content and useful to the user and can contain keywords, but again don’t overdo it and try and keep it to 60 to 70 characters.

Description tag

Again, this tag is important, while it might not get you ranking on its own, you should have a good description in place. Google may pull from the description tag when displaying search results so make sure it is descriptive and useful. This can be especially useful on pages with very little text content or with only widgets or games. Keep it to 150 to 200 characters though.

Canonical tag

This is seen as a “strong suggestion” by search engines so you don’t shoot yourself in the foot, but if you have complicated cms’s, multiple pages with the same content displayed in different ways, then yes this tag should be in place and set up correctly. This can be used to avoid potential penalties through accident duplicate content on the same site.

Author tag

If you can get your author code set up this is a great one to have in place, it will make a picture of you (taken from your Google+ page) appear in searches next to articles you’ve written. It has got a lot more simple to set up since it was initially put in place. If you run a blog this should be something you set up as soon as possible.

Keywords tag

Google does not look at the keywords tag so it is pointless filling them in, Bing have even said they look at it but often use it as a spam signal if it is over stuffed so don’t waste your time filling it in at best you’re wasting your time and at best you could be incurring a penalty.

Tips by Gareth Goddard who runs Goddard SEO in London UK.