The role of metatags is misunderstood by some members of the webmaster community. I still have people who are not in the business come up to me and talk about SEO as if it's all about picking keywords metatags. I try not to cringe when I get into these discussions. I once had an idea for an article about this. The article was going to be completely blank. Only those that were enterprising enough to look at the source would have seen the content of the article in the keyword metatags:
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, metatags, do,
not, matter" />
I have built tons of high ranking sites and not implemented any keywords metatags at all. In fact, Matt Cutts confirmed in 2009 that Google does not use the keywords metatag. The fundamental reason for search engines to ignore the keyword metatag is that spammers abused it in the early days of SEO.
Search engines prefer to focus all of their attention on "user visible" text. The user can't see the keywords metatags unless they view the source of your web page. It's this invisible aspect that makes the keywords metatag so attractive for a spammer to abuse it.
So what about metatags in general? This article will provide an overview of their value and the best way to use them.
Title Tag
The title tag is the single most important "on page" element in telling a search engine what your page is all about. Yes, the title tag is incredibly important. During the design of your site, you should have decided on the best keywords for each of your pages. For each page, you should use the most important keywords (note: keywords means "search phrases" as used in this article) in your title tag. For example, if the most important keyword for your page is "blue widgets", you may use a title tag such as:
ajmalseotips.blogspot.com
<title>Blue Widgets from Blue Widget Manufacturing</title>
You can emphasize more than one keyword, but should limit it to no more than 3, as follows:
<title>Blue Widgets, Round Blue Widgets, and Square Blue
Widgets</title>
Note that we trimmed off the company name in this example. There are some SEOs that recommend that it's best to keep your title tag to 65 characters or less. Our opinion is that longer title tags are probably not harmful, but the extra characters are ignored by some search engines. Given that the extra characters are ignored, we tend to keep ours less than 65 characters.
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