subject: Do I Need Geographic Keywords In My Meta Tags? [print this page] When someone is trying to get their local business noticed on the internet, they almost always turn mostly to SEO as this is the most affordable way to get more visitors to a company's website. In terms of economical search engine optimization, there isn't anything which is much easier to do than to update the meta tags of your web pages, but many people spend a lot of time worrying about what kinds of words they should be putting in these pages. Some people have a loose idea of the fact that the search engines do put an emphasis on a searcher's geography, but they aren't sure how to address that in their own SEO efforts.
The interesting thing is that while putting geographic keywords into your meta tags certainly won't hurt you in bringing in some local search engine traffic, it might not actually help you as much as you might hope either. There has been a constant evolution of the algorithms which are used by search engines to organize the results they return to searchers over the years, and one of the changes which was gradual at first and has become more pronounced lately is the giving of less weight to meta tag content when rankings search engine results, primarily because so many people were abusing their meta tags and just stuffing them with keywords they thought would drive traffic instead of providing accurate descriptions.
So you can put geographic keywords into your meta tags, but there might be better ways to achieve your SEO goals. One good way is to write lots of high quality content and post it to your own site or blog, but to also get out there and get it posted on many different article syndication sites. Do this with an emphasis on geographic keywords and it could have far more of an effect on local traffic than just putting those keywords in your meta tags.
Another good strategy in this regard is to build links from sites that are related in terms of your geographic area, not just your topical area. The search engines value back links very highly, but more so if the sites you're linked to are related. For example, sites from other pages which are discussing or reviewing businesses in your area could be very valuable to build if you want help in bringing local internet searchers to your website.
