Are meta tags useless?
-
I thought they were, but I don't work for a full-fledged SEO agency. I'm a copywriter at a marketing firm so my SEO efforts are generally limited to inserting keywords into on-page content, page titles, and URLs.
However, one of our clients works with an SEO agency. Whenever we add a new page to the client's website, they ask the SEO agency for keyword recommendations, which are then passed along to us to implement. The recommendations always include meta tags, so I guess I was wrong about them being useless?
Can anyone tell me the purpose of meta tags? Thanks!
-
View the page source (right click + view page source), look in the section. Youll see it -
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2" /> Tip: if theres a lot of stuff crammed into the HEAD section, just CTRL-F and search for ``` (meta name="keywords") without the parenthesis
-
Simply view the source of a webpage and you can see the Meta Keyword tag in the HTML code. To view the source, go to a webpage, right click and select "View Page Source" and you'll see the HTML code. Hope that helps!
-
Thanks for the answer! That's basically what I thought.
But how can competitors see our client's meta keywords? Where do they show up?
-
You're opening a can with this question!
The efficacy of meta tags is much debated. Most people believe that the keyword meta tag has no effect whatsoever on SEO, and some believe the same to be true for the meta description.
The original purpose of the meta keywords tag was to help Search Engines understand what your page was about. After years of unabashed over-optimization, the tag slowly became less and less of a signal.
The meta description tag is a brief description of the page, and is sometimes used as the description in the SERPs. There are varying arguments on the efficacy of this tag as well, although it can be useful from a clickthrough conversion standpoint.
I'm sure youll get a lot of varying opinions on this one!
-
Meta Keywords are worthless. None of the major search engines use them as a ranking factor anymore. If anything, their use can actually have a negative impact since you will be revealing your targeted keywords to your competitors. (Most competent SEOs can determine your targeted keywords by looking at your site anyways but no need to make their job that much easier!)
That being said, Meta Description is still important, even if they aren't necessarily considered a ranking factor, they allow you to have control over the snippet of text that shows up under your listing in the SERPs.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Tag Clouds in Google Despite Canonical Links for Single Tags/Articles
I am frustrated to see a lot tag clouds in Google even though I programmed my tagged pages to display a canonical link to the linking article if the is only one result for the tag cloud. The goal to to make sure that the article, which is of better quality than the tag page, ends up in Google without a bunch of thin tag pages getting in there. For instance this article should be in Google and this tag should not be because that tag has a canonical URL for that article. I do not have a lot of experience with tag cloud SEO because I prefer to limit such pages to categories, but I have found tag clouds to be important for aggregating information for specific issues, people, or places that are not already a site category. Some tags I have used to power social media pages that update automatically from RSS feeds for their related tag archives. That is quite useful for pages like that. Should I start using Meta noindex for those instead of rel canonical? I have already done that for author profiles because author profiles get a lot of on site links compared to individual articles because my gridviews use javascript for paging. The same is true for the tags, so if a tag is tagged in 30 articles it will have links from 30 articles but if those articles are not in the latest 20 for that tag only the latest 20 will have links back from the tag archive. I also suspect having a lot of tag pages with little content to negatively impact my indexing rate. I will see a number of recent tag pages added before new articles.
On-Page Optimization | | CopBlaster.com0 -
Search results meta error?
Hello I am new here. When I search my brand name "amazingbeautyhair" in google it shows like this,I have meta description,why it shows like this?how to fix please? sdWx6
On-Page Optimization | | yitong0 -
Product Tags
So Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, this are NOT meta tags) which I believe are used for when customers want to search for a product using the search function. So one of my tags could be ''star wars socks'', and when a customer types this into the search it brings up every product containing the tag for socks. This is all good and well, however, these tags appear on the product page itself, right below the Manufacturer/Brand, and above the price. Will Google look kindly on this or could it be considered as keyword stuffing? Or will Google know they're for search and ignore them? I just need to know whether or not removing them entirely will be a good or bad idea.
On-Page Optimization | | moon-boots0 -
Anchor Tag around a Div
Just Curious if this is an SEO No-No! I have set up the box to do some cool SEO transitions but am curious if I am loosing on a signifigant amount of internal linking considering anchor text or if Google recognizes the h2 as anchor text. Thanks. [ Article Title Article Synopsis Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.](internal-page.html)
On-Page Optimization | | Vspeed0 -
H1 Tags on Volusion Product Pages
So I'm working with a client who has no heading tags on his site and I'm wondering if there is an ideal method to implementing these on the product pages specifically, as the wording I ideally want to specify is is the product title, which i can't really code with an H1. Has anyone run into this issue? If so, what was your solution? Also, how vital are these heading tags on the product pages, anyways? If the Volusion SEO expert could chime in, that would be much appreciated. Thanks everyone!
On-Page Optimization | | BrandLabs0 -
To enter keyword meta tags or to not enter keyword meta tags?
I've been doing SEO for awhile, but new to SEOMoz. I'm surprised that SEOMoz does not recommend keyword meta tags. I didn't enter them for the longest time because I know Google doesn't care about them. However, I did read that other search engines DO use them. And therefore that is why you should have them. I teach my customers about SEO, and I know it would be much easier for them not to enter or worry about the keyword meta tags. However, I would love to hear opinions here. And to Bing/Yahoo put any weight into them or is it only really small search engines? Thanks! Hilary
On-Page Optimization | | endlessrange0 -
Downloading Meta Data
I'm about to do a site audit, and as part of it I need to download all the metadata so that I can see what is ok, and what needs to change. I've seen tools that allow you to do this a million times, and even used a few. But today for some reason I'm drawing a blank. Can someone help me please? Best case scenario, the tool is free, but I'm not opposed to paying if it's going to save me a lot of time.
On-Page Optimization | | ZephSnapp0 -
Missing meta descriptions on indexed pages, portfolio, tags, author and archive pages. I am using SEO all in one, any advice?
I am having a few problems that I can't seem to work out.....I am fairly new to this and can't seem to work out the following: Any help would be greatly appreciated 🙂 1. I am missing alot of meta description tags. I have installed "All in One SEO" but there seems to be no options to add meta descriptions in portfolio posts. I have also written meta descriptions for 'tags' and whilst I can see them in WP they don't seem to be activated. 2. The blog has pages indexed by WP- called Part 2 (/page/2), Part 3 (/page/3) etc. How do I solve this issue of meta descriptions and indexed pages? 3. There is also a page for myself, the author, that has multiple indexes for all the blog posts I have written, and I can't edit these archives to add meta descriptions. This also applies to the month archives for the blog. 4. Also, SEOmoz tells me that I have too many links on my blog page (also indexed) and their consequent tags. This also applies to the author pages (myself ). How do I fix this? Thanks for your help 🙂 Regards Nadia
On-Page Optimization | | PHDAustralia680