If you've looked into optimising your website for search engines, you'll probably have heard of meta tags. These are pieces of text embedded in the html of your web pages, including a title, a description, and keywords, which the visitor to your site will not see, but which can be read by search engines' spiders.

You will probably also have heard mixed opinions about how important meta tags are to your search engine rankings. The fact is that search engines take much less notice of meta tags than they used to, simply because they are chosen at the discretion of the webmaster. When search engines such as AltaVista placed a lot of weight on meta tags, and particularly meta keywords, it became clear that people could not be trusted to be honest about the content of their pages. Spam keywords, unrelated to the content, could easily be inserted into the meta tags of a page to attract more traffic, and many unscrupulous webmasters would repeat a keyword excessively in the hopes of fooling the search engines about page relevancy.

The result of this has been that search engines take a lot less notice of meta tags than they used to, relying on factors which are more difficult for webmasters and designers to manipulate, such as links into the site from third party pages, and keyword density of the copy. Newer search engines like Google don't seem to take the meta keyword tag into account at all. However, there is no reason not to your meta tags right; they could make a small difference to your ranking and if you write them correctly, they certainly won't do you any harm.

The Title Tag

The title tag is, nowadays, the only meta tag that Google and other search engines take more than a little notice of. The title tag of a page is what is displayed as a link when that page appears in search engine results, and the keywords in the titles (and the order thereof) contribute to the perceived relevance of the page, as well as affecting how visitors will see your page. Also, the title tag is the default name when visitors decide to bookmark your page. Therefore it's important that you use unique title tags for every page of your website, and that relevant keywords and descriptive titles come before your company name, if you insist on using it at all. It's okay to repeat words in your title tag so long as they are separated from one another and you do not repeat them more than once or twice.

The Description Tag

The description tag also still has some value, as, while generally speaking Google shows "snippets" from the content of your pages in search engine results, it does also occasionally use the description tag. Other search engines may also use the description tag to show what a page contains. Also, if your visitors are using a social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia, the description tags of your pages will automatically appear when they add your links to their account. Therefore they're worth getting right to give your visitors the right impression, even if it doesn't affect your search engine rankings. Try to keep your description tags concise and to-the-point. Again, repeating words is acceptable so long as it is not gratuitous and you only repeat one or two times.

The Keyword Tag

Keyword tags are the most sorely abused of the meta tags, and because of this, they are also probably the least important. Some SEO experts will tell you that if you have a site with a lot of pages, you may as well save your time and not bother with them at all. If you are going to use them, make sure that you only select words which actually appear in the content of your page. Don't repeat words or use several tenses or plural versions of the same word.

Conclusion

While meta tags are not terribly important to the major search engines, you might hook a few visitors from smaller search engines which do use them to influence their rankings. Besides, it's not just about SEO – writing good title and description tags will improve your visitors' overall experience of your site.

By Natalie Catchpole

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