Meta Tags - Which ones should we use?

There often isn't a week that goes by that I get asked about keyword tags and how important they are, or whether they should use a variety of other meta tags to help the search engines index their site. Everyone wants to know which meta tags are the ones that are most important and which ones they can ignore.

It's all in the title
The answer, well it isn't exactly black and white. However, it is widely agreed that the most important tag, as of right now is the title tag. This tag should be written in such a way as to have your most important keyword/phrase included and it should be straight to the point. The title tag should also be unique for each page. For example, your products page should have a title geared towards your products while your company history page should have a title that relates to the history page. If someone only saw the title tag for each page they should be able to get a good idea of what that page will be about.

A good description always helps
Another tag that is important, but not for the reasons you may think is the description tag. This tag is invisible to the front-end user (unless you view source), but the search engines will use this tag to display as your search engine result listings. They generally speaking do not use this tag as a factor in your rankings, but it will give them some idea of what you feel the page is about. As with the title tag, this should be unique for each page.

Keywords aren't the key anymore
There was a time when the keyword meta tag was one of the most important tags on your website. Any word/phrase you put in there was a possible word/phrase that you would show up in in the search engines. Put them in there more then once, and you stood an even better chance. However, today this tag is seldom used by the search engines if at all. More often then not this tag is used for spam purposes and the search engines have decided not to even think about using it as a ranking factor.

The never ending list of meta tags
There are many, many meta tags that can be used within a page. However, most of them serve little to no purpose for the search engines. When you try to put all of these tags into each page you are making the search engines work harder to get to what is most important which is the content of the website. Ignite suggests that you stick to the basics. Make sure you have unique title tags, unique description tags, and if you have to you can use the keyword tags but make sure not to stuff them full of keyword phrases.

Remember: Less is often more, especially when it comes to placing keyword/phrases in meta tags.

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