Meta tags are are some of the most important and under-rated elements to any pages ability to rank for desired keywords in the organic search results, all too easily forgotten by many. They are also some of the most spammy and abused on page elements, which has decreased their value to an extent over the years. That said they are still probably the number one item that any good SEO can work with to make quick and impactful differences to a websites traffic. Here’s my posts about meta tags SEO with some insight, examples as well as tips on how to produce better meta tags for your site.
I recently wrote an article about why the humble meta description is still mega important. MOZ included it in their YouMoz blog and it has been well received.
It covers:
Check out the Moz article here.
Ok so we all (should) know how important page titles (or meta titles) and meta descriptions are. Page titles help you rank for keywords and meta descriptions really help increase your CTR (clickthrough rate) from search engines. Page titles also being your search result title (most of the time) also greatly helps CTR so you wanna get the title and meta description length right, right?
I believe the ranking power of page titles (or meta titles) isnt as strong as it once was but boy are they still strong. Probably still the strongest on page ranking factor and massively helpful to help increase clickthrough rate (CTR) and therefore traffic.
If your site has a lot of pages and especially if its an ecommerce web site one of the really quick and legit gains you can make in the SERPS is by addressing the duplicate page titles you may have on your site.
Page titles still remain ‘the’ most important on-page element in helping to rank for specific phrases so having a whole bunch of page titles that are duplicate, and worse – not even representative of the page content/product is a really wasted opportunity. Unique and descriptive page titles should be one of your SEO priorities. Ensuring all your page titles are unique and represent the page content is a major step to maximising the number of pages on your site that can rank well for a wide variety of terms.
I still get asked about the value of meta keywords, often called meta tags, all the time. If you thought you still need meta keywords placed in your site think again…