A question I’m often asked is, “Is it worth using meta tags?” As long as SEO experts have been publishing advice on search engine optimization, the answers have been as varied as the respondents.

From my perspective, anything you can do to make it easier for both users and search engine crawlers to understand your web pages has benefits. While often abused, meta tagging provides some assistance in this regard.

Title tags should be a focused indication of the on-page content with the primary keywords to the left (first), yet they should be written in sentence form and if relevant, with a call to action. Writing page titles is both an art and a science. It is my experience that titles count on all search engines.

Moving on to the description and keywords tags, I find that Yahoo! Search gives them considerable weight, while Google does not. A meta description should be an elaboration of the title. A few search engines will display the meta description you supply, so its use as a link description in the search results will influence clickthrough to the web site.

Having worked on more than one hundred site optimization projects over the past ten years, the most common mistake I see is coding the exact same title/meta information on every page of the web site. This may save the web developer and content editors some time on site maintenance, but it does very little to distinguish one page from another. Search engines index web pages, not websites.

Dynamic web sites can automatically populate title and meta description tags from the database. Be sure that your CMS software provides unique titles, keywords and description capabilities. WordPress, for instance, will provide unique titles and keywords with the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin.

I welcome your experiences with meta tagging and look forward to your comments.

Brandon

P.S. Here’s a reply to a previous question about meta tagging.

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