subject: Google Meta Tags And Their Impact On Seo [print this page] Google Meta tags are an important but often underrated part of a website marketing campaign that when used correctly, can have a great impact on search engine optimization. Put basically, Meta tags are HTML tags that are placed in the head of webpages that provide information about the site and are invisible to visitors (besides for the title) but can be crawled by Google spiders.
An SEO company takes four Meta tags into consideration when planning the SEO strategy of your site. They are;
Meta Title Tag
The Meta title tag tells a search engine the title of the page and is the most important Meta tag for Search Engine Optimization purposes as it has a great impact on where the page is ranked in searches.
Meta Keywords Attribute
The Meta keywords attribute pertains to relevant keywords added by you or your SEO service provider. Finding the right Meta keywords for your site is a vital part of your SEO strategy as they have an impact on search engines, in particular on Yahoo. It also affects how visitors view pages through your site search.
If using an SEO company is not an option and you do not want to take the time and effort to generate Meta keywords by hand, a Meta keyword generator such as WordStreams keyword tool can do most of the hard work for you.
Meta Description Attribute
The Meta description attribute provides search engines with a brief description of the page. This is then shown as a brief summery on the search results page. The wording of the Meta description attribute is very important from an SEO perspective as it essentially acts as your advert within organic search results.
Meta Robots Attribute
The Meta robots attribute is how you or your SEO Services provider gives instructions to search engines as to what they should do with the page. The two main instructions that affect search engine optimization are;
Index/noindex This tells search engines whether your page should show up in search results, or not.
Follow/nofollow This tells search engines whether they should trust and "follow" the links on your page to the next page or not.
Your SEO service provider will take the time to ensure your Meta tags are placed correctly in order to maximize your search engine marketing campaign. However, if an SEO Company is not used, you should make sure that your Meta tags are implemented correctly to gain maximum exposure from search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
