In this article I’ll explain what meta tags are, focussing on meta description and keywords. I’ll explain why it’s important to add these to every page, but why we shouldn’t rely on them as a magical solution for getting to the top of Google.
What are meta tags?
Meta tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages. This is information which is hidden to human visitors, instead it communicates information to search engines about the contents of the page.
Meta tags are usually written out in the code for the page like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="SiteRay, web testing, website testing, accessibility, SEO" />
<meta name="description" content="SiteRay is a tool for testing and reporting on websites." />
If you’re not used to putting code directly into your website then don’t worry about the code above. If you’re using a CMS, blog or forum, most of these have ways for you to enter meta tags without having to directly edit the code.
There are many more types of meta tags than written above, but in this article we’ll just discuss meta description and keywords. Both of these tags will describe the page in some way. I’ll describe each of these in this article.
Using a meta description
When a user searches for your site (or product) in a search engine, they will see a list of resulting matches. Here’s an example of a result on Google for the term “SiteRay”:
The first line is the page’s name (taken from the <title> tag on the page), this is also a link to the page. After that comes a description of the page, this is most likely the description that you set in your “description” meta tag (but not always, see below). This is the information that users will read before they even get to your page, which is why it’s so important. Make sure this text tells the user everything they need to know about the page, and be concise as possible because search engines may clip it down. But if you don’t put enough words in, they may pad it out by taking wording from elsewhere on your page. Generally 200 – 250 characters is about right.
If you want to know more about writing a better meta description see our tips here.
Google doesn’t always show what you want it to
Unfortunately whenever you use a meta description on a page, it’s not guaranteed that this is what search engines will display when presenting their results. The entry for your page might contain the full text you specified in your meta description, or it might contain part of it, or it might contain none of it.
Google will try and show you a description which is related to the search term that you used. So lets see the example that we used above again this time searching for “SiteRay enhance any website”:
In the search term I’d added some words which were in the page content, but not in the meta description. So what has happened is Google have displayed the first part of the meta description, then cut it off with “…” and then finished the description by taking some of the page content, and showing where my search terms appear in the content of the page.
So Google won’t always show your meta description exactly, as it will depend on what the user searches for and the content on your page. But it’s still very important to use a meta description as default text.
What happens if we don’t use a meta description?
If you don’t use a meta description on your page, search engines will have to make up the description that they show in their results. To do this they will take some page content, which might not be relevant to what a user wants to see. The content might be overly verbose, and be cut short before it gets to the interesting bit, or it might just be totally irrelevant. The thing is, you aren’t in control.
Why do we need a unique meta description on every page?
It’s important to put meta description on each page of your website, because each of your pages are important (if they aren’t important, why do you need that page?). When a user comes to your site from a search engine, they’re not always going to come straight to the homepage. Search engines can display any of your pages in their search results, and will try and show the page that best matches what you searched for.
Let me give an example, say you’re a company selling multiple products. Each of your products has a separate page on your website. When a user searches, they’re often more likely to be looking for your product rather than searching for your company name. Which means search engines will try and take them directly to the product on your site, bypassing your website homepage which might not contain any information they want to see right now.
So it’s important to set a unique meta description for each page. This way, users will see it in the search results, and read a small description of that exact page, and they can decide if it’s what they want to look at.
So lets give an example of how this could be done badly. If you’re a company selling products, lets say cakes. All of your product pages might have the exact same meta description as the homepage, which says:
“A company based in Derbyshire, UK, we have been making cakes since 1895 and have a wide variety.”
A user might be specifically looking for wedding cakes and has searched Google for “wedding cakes”. Your page on wedding cakes has come up (not the homepage), but the description of your “wedding cake” page is the same as your homepage. At this stage the user doesn’t need to know you’ve been around since 1895, and they’re not interested in your variety, they just want to know about wedding cakes.
So instead of visiting your site, they visit the one below where the description is:
“We make lovely wedding cakes. Here are some photos and prices of our best examples.”
A useful summary of each page can be very important when users are coming from to your site from a search engine.
Also it’s important that each page has a different and unique description. Google will see if all pages on your site has the same description and ignore it. To test your entire site for duplicate meta descriptions you could use SiteBeam.
Using meta keywords
The meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional words for search engines to use to better display their results… in theory. A few years ago this was true, and the keywords were very important in helping search engines when ranking sites.
Unfortunately major search engines now ignore the keywords tag. This includes Google and Bing. There’s a great article here about meta keywords and how they haven’t been used by search engines for quite a long time. So it’s surprising to me as a web developer that we still get calls from clients or third party SEO companies who still put a lot of importance on adding meta keywords to pages, thinking that it will improve their ranking in Google. Unfortunately adding meta keywords just won’t improve your Google ranking at all.
Some search engines do still use meta keywords to affect their rankings. As of June 2010, Yahoo! is still using keywords to affect its rankings.
If you still want to add keywords, then consider the most important words to that page. These should be words that you expect people will be typing into search engines to find this page. If this page relates to a product, the name of the product is probably the most important keyword, followed by its important qualities or features.
Meta tags are not a magic solution
As we’ve seen, meta tags aren’t the magical solution to getting you higher on search engines. Meta keywords are mostly ignored, and description is sometimes overwritten depending on what the user is searching for.
If you’re really interested in search engine optimisation, it’s more worthwhile these days to look at the content of your page rather than the meta tags.
But getting people to your site from Google’s search results page is still very important, which is why it’s still very important to set a descriptive and helpful meta description tag.
