While it is true that Google has stated it  no longer uses meta title, description, and keyword tags to determine search results position, it is not true that meta tags should be ignored.

Ignore meta tags at your own risk, if you care about your search results position.

META TITLE TAG

What you put in your meta title tag is what is displayed in the blue “page title bar” at the top of your browser when you go to a webpage.

Since searchers read the titles of listings before they read the descriptions, you should give careful thought to your page title.

 1) The keyword for that page should be in the first 3 words of the page title, or as close to the beginning of the title as possible.

2) For “local SEO”, your geographic location should be included in the page title.

3) Use the vertical bar “|”, called a “pipe”, on your keyboard (it’s on the same key as the backslash “\”) to separate parts of a page title. Do not use commas or dashes. The pipe also makes it easy to eliminate useless words like…in, of, for, to

4) Title length = 70 characters, max (including spaces). Anything over 70 charactes may (and probably will) be truncated.

For example: The page title for an electrical contractor in the San Jose CA area that does both residential and commercial work might read like this…

 Electrician | Residential | Commercial | San Jose 

 This is the exact title that will be put in the “meta title tag” and the exact title that will appear for the search results listing for that page.

Note that the keyword “electrician” is at the front of the title, followed by what type of electrical work they do, followed by the local area they serve…a very logical way of describing the contents of that webpage.

The meta title tag is the 2nd most important aspect of “on-page SEO” (fresh original content is #1).

Do not ignore the meta title tag!

META DESCRIPTION TAG

The description that appears in your search results listing is pulled directly from your meta description tag.

If you have left this tag empty, then Google will pull whatever text from you page it feels like and display that as your page description.

 1) The keyword for that page must be near the beginning of the description.

2) Use alpha numeric characters only.

3) Use standard punctuation (get over it –  proper punctuation and sentence structure are critical, if you want the reader to understand your description).

4) Length = 160 characters, max (including spaces). Anything over 160 characters may (and probably will) be truncated.

Your title gets their attenion in a search results list.

If your title grabs their attention, they might read your description.

Odds are very low that your description will be read if you don’t have a good title.

Do not ignore the meta description tag!

META KEYWORD TAG

No, you can’t ignore this tag either.

While Google no longer uses it, many smaller search engines still give a lot of search juice to the keyword tag.

SUMMARY

If you’re doing your own up-dates to the site with a CMS system (Content Management System) you should have a web maintenance firm check your meta tags.

For all of your web maintenance and Internet marketing needs call us at 877.280.2424