Meta Tags Search Engine Optimization

I create Search Engine Optimized WordPress Themes and include both the keywords meta tag and description meta tag in the WordPress themes mostly because customers expect them.

As an experienced SEO consultant I know meta tags today (2010) have little search engine value beyond blocking search engines from indexing pages, caching them etc…, the keywords meta tag for example is pretty much ignored by major search engines, Google in particular ignores the keywords meta tag completely.

That being said the description meta tag has some value because Google MAY use it as the description for a pages SERPs and though it won’t increase a pages rankings it might increase the number of clicks from a Google search if the description is written well.

First off, when you view source of a web page the top of the HTML code will look something like this (will probably be more lines, especially if you run a blog with RSS feeds, but below is the basics):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”> <HTML><HEAD> <TITLE>Title of the Page</TITLE> <meta name=”description” content=”You really want to view this site because it's blinking awesome, click me, CLICK ME!!!”> <meta name=”keywords” content=”bunch, of, keywords, that, major, search, engines, like, Google, IGNORE”> <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″> <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”../stylesheet.css” media=”all”> </HEAD> <body>

Of the above the only code that really matters to Google is the Title element (some SEO’s call this the Title tag, but it’s not a meta tag it’s an element), the title element matters a LOT, and the description meta tag matters a little, since it doesn’t increase rankings (it won’t increase how high in a search result a page will be shown), but it might increase the click through rate from a Google search IF you write awesome ad like descriptions that result in Google searchers having to click your link because the world will end otherwise

Description Meta Tags Value for Google SEO

When you do a Google search each of the results have a title (copy of the title element from the page in question) and a description of the page that can be automatically generated by Google from a snippet of text from the page (usually it will include all or some of the keywords searched for), from the pages DMOZ listing description (which can be an awful description) or from the pages meta description tag.

If the page in question isn’t listed in DMOZ or the site owner has blocked Google from using a DMOZ listing by using the DMOZ robots meta tag that blocks Google from using the DMOZ description:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">

The page description will either be the automated snippet of text generated from Google or the contents of the description meta tag.

Note: even when you create a custom description meta tag Google won’t always use it, you might still see the automated, almost random description.

Beyond the meta description tag no other meta tags have any SEO ranking value and since even the description meta tag doesn’t have any search engine rankings value NO meta tags result in better search engine results. What this means is if you don’t write custom meta description tags (I don’t) you can add no meta tags to a page that you want indexing by search engines and don’t want to use any of the meta tags that block caching or block spidering by specific search engines etc…

Basically meta tags are not important from an SEO perspective and can either be left out or if you use a CMS like WordPress (like I do) have the CMS generate the meta tags automatically (mainly because you can ). Many WordPress theme customers expect the keywords and description meta tags which is why I include them, but the code I use gives the customer the option to let the theme automatically generate them or in the case of the description meta tag generate custom tags.

David Law