What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are a great way for Webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. SEO Meta can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the Meta tags they understand and ignores the rest.
Do Meta Tags Help SEO?
Ranking high in Google in 2017 has far more to do with relevance and reputation of high-quality content, user satisfaction and popularity than Meta tag optimization.
In my experience, Meta tags do not noticeably influence where a page ranks in Google, in a positive way.
Meta tags, when used properly can still be useful in a number of areas outside just ranking pages. Abuse them, and you might fall foul of Google’s punitive quality algorithms.
Does Google Use What Is In Meta Tags For Ranking Pages?
Some search engines once looked to hidden HTML tags like these to help order pages in search engine results pages, but most search engines (in 2017) have evolved past this, and Google certainly has.
Google is on record as saying it does not use some data in Meta when ranking a page (in a positive way) and tests throughout the years have certainly seemed to confirm this.
What Do Meta Tags Do in SEO?
Meta Data can help describe any page in a more convenient machine readable format, more suited to search engines, but they are very likely to get spammed, and so ultimately limited on their own, when it comes to ranking documents on the web.
It is more likely, I think, Google would look for abuse in such tags and penalize it in some way, rather than reward it.
Google may use metadata, amongst many other signals, to CLASSIFY pages, or DISPLAY information about a page in SERPs, although, in natural results in the UK, I see its impact, where it can be detected, when used at all, being used mainly for DISPLAY purposes.
I look for duplicate boilerplate text in Meta descriptions, as they are often a sign of lower quality pages. I do this because Google says they don’t like that practice – and it is in their guidelines NOT to do it.
Perhaps Google looks at how unique your Meta description IS relative to other pages on your site.
Pages are supposed to ‘stand on their own’ – perhaps algorithms check that they do, and you are not using low-quality techniques to generate them.
Do Meta Tags control my search snippet listing in Google?
Sometimes, yes, at least in the case of the Meta Description, but not always, and this is dependent on many factors. Google will pick its own preferred search snippet for SERPs for display purposes, based on elements that can still be influenced by whoever made the page (and site) – and what Google knows about the page.
How to Write Meta Tags
You can still be creative when thinking about some tags like the Meta Description, but meta tags are best used when EXACTLY describing the page in question, and helping Google to short cut to information about your page. If you are helping Google serve, especially informational queries, and helping short-cut to data, Google is your friend, and most can still benefit from that relationship.
When used properly Meta Descriptions traditionally helped form the ultra-important ‘hook’ of your advertising in the free SERPs.
Your tags should be accurate, relevant and descriptive, and be careful focusing them all unnecessarily on just one keyword, but don’t think ‘meta tags’ until you have thought about what the ‘topic‘ and ‘concept‘ of a page is, its ‘purpose‘ and end ‘user experience’.
Satisfying all is key to building reputation, in Google, and on social channels. If you are optimizing for Google, don’t think page or article, think ‘topic’ or ‘subject’ or information ‘hub’. Google aims to return rich, informative editorial pages in LOTS of organic results in future – that trend is evident in some niches.
All major search engines recommend sensible use of meta data and if you’re writing useful, descriptive tags it will be unlikely any major search engine will penalize proper use – when no low-quality shortcuts are took, at least.
Most search engines use or have used meta information in some way to help classify a document, but just because a search engine ‘uses’ meta-description tags, for instance, doesn’t mean they are using it as a positive ranking signal where your page ranks in the SERPs.
Source: Hobo-Web
