SEO through Meta tags optimization is a practice that's fast losing its sheen owing to the entry of other optimisation methods such as keyword density, content, link building and page themes. Most experts are calling Meta tags an obsolete phenomenon that would not hold any importance in the world of
Search engine optimization in the coming months.
Let's take a look at the significance of Meta tags to search engine optimisation, while they are still in use.
What Are Meta Tags?
These are hidden codes that can only be read by spiders, or what we technically call search engine web crawlers. They are placed in the of the webpage and clearly summarise the nature of the website. If you are designing a website, then you will need to give special importance to two of the most important Meta tags, i.e. the description Meta tag and the keyword Meta tag.
Tag Sequencing
This does not hold any importance, according to major search engines (due to their ever changing search algorithms) and W3C but, contrary to this information, it has been found out that there is a significant difference when tags and attributes are in a certain order.
The Description META Tag
This tag constitutes the text that is going to be displayed under your title on the search engines results page. The number of character that you can have in this particular tag is a subject of great controversy. It's often being noticed that sites have whole paragraphs as their description are listed on top of the search results.
Citing this fact, it is clear that the number of characters that may be used in a description META tag do not hold any importance.
The best approach is to use less than 150 characters for description Meta tag (spaces included) and not to repeat your keywords more than thrice. Contrary to popular belief that keyword placements do not matter, using keywords at the beginning of a description can do wonders to your rankings.
The Keyword META Tag
The subject of Keyword Meta tags is highly controversial. Some time ago, Google changed its algorithms and this Meta tag lost a lot of importance. Besides Google, this tag holds a lot of importance for a number of other search engines and should be carefully worked with. Ideally, you can have upto 800 characters for this tag (spaces included).
Repeating a keyword thrice may be considered as something done "out of necessity". Repeating it more than thrice is considered as spamming of search results by all search engines.
Another thing that is considered to be a spamming technique is to use keywords that aren't being used in the "main body" of your site. This is all you will need to know about Meta Tags.
