The Importance of <meta> tags

I've been performing some tidying-up work on my website and a quick comparison of my <meta> tags with what Google reported for some of my web pages indicated that Google was using a the <META NAME="description" CONTENT=""> as well as the content tag (sometimes instead of) to add descriptions of some of my pages.

Now, I'd read somewhere the the <meta> tags were declining in terms of their usage, so I'd taken my eye off the boll as far as these components of my pages were concerned. Basically I'd missed a major trick — and now I was paying for it.

'Why is this important?' you may ask. Well, some of my pages, though they had different content had the same <meta> tags as others and Google was considering them as 'similar' and dumping the second page as a 'supplemental' result. Essentially, because of a stupid oversight I was losing pages of content from Google's main index. More importantly I was losing free advertising.

'How so?' you may well ask. For each page of your site that's indexed Google has a title of up to 66 characters and a description of up to 160 characters. This is your advertisement, your pitch to get visitors to come to various sections of your site. I know that the holy grail of SEO at the moment is to get your web page to be the first in Google's (or whatever search system you're targetting) list of results. If you're striving for this, then take a step back and consider how you're actually using the search results yourself. When you type in a search term or string and Google returns the results then you'll see about eight results of the ten that Google returns. Do you immediately go to the result on the first position and click, or do your eyes gaze over the results and if there's a title or strapline that interests you, do you then click on that one?

If you're perfectly honest with yourself (and studies of how people actually use web pages confirms this) then you're probably in the majority of those who glance at the descriptions and straplines to see something that interests them. Those who have bold headings and can write good content (within the 160-word limit of the strapline) will get the most traffic. OK, so it's important to get on the first page of results if you can, but it's far better for you to write good copy that will draw visitors in rather than trying to squeeeze the final few placings for your page.

This means that you will need to take a close look at the <title> tag of your web pages as this is what provides the title in the search engines. Beyond this you need to take a close look at anything that might be used to provide the description for your web page. This includes the <META NAME="description" CONTENT=""> tag and your first >h1> heading as well as the first sentence of your main text. If take care of all this then you should improve the chances of your web page being spotted from amongst the crowd. However, you won't really know if this effort has been worth it until your page does get indexed and you can see what text's being reported. Once you see this text then you may well want to edit it to make the information initially reported abut your web page be 'punchier' and stand out more.

Like all advertising making the most of how people perceive your page in that first search engine report is a question of editing, refining and testing. This is your first contact with a potential customer and your should make the most of it.