Keep page title tags to 12 words and under 60 characters. Include keyword phrase. Use 50-word meta descriptions with short sentences. Avoid repetition. Be succinct. Do not keyword stuff. Summarise the page. Make meta tags unique to the page. Review and optimise your SERP snippet.
Meta Description Best Practices
Create a 50-word (300 character) summary of your page using short sentences. Add it to article and repeat it in the meta description. Avoid repetition. Be succinct. Do not keyword stuff. Make meta tags unique to the page. Review your SERP snippet. Programmatically generate meta descriptions on larger sites.
Meta Keywords Tags Best Practices
You can safely ignore optimising meta keywords tags for search engines like Google and Bing. Both search engines ignore meta keywords data. They have confirmed it. Tests confirm it.
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta Tags are used by Google and other search engines in some not-so-obvious ways.
Do Meta Tags Help SEO?
Ranking high in Google has far more to do with relevance and reputation of high-quality content, user satisfaction and online popularity than simple meta tag optimisation.
In my experience, most 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 e.g. to improve click-through rates from the SERP. Abuse them, and you might fall foul of Google’s punitive quality algorithms.
What Are The Most Important Meta Tags For SEO?
For the purposes of this ‘beginners guide to meta tags’, I focus on the three meta tags I am asked about the most:
- meta description (optional, potentially import and used by Google sometimes)
- meta robots (optional, used by Google)
- meta keywords (optional, ignored by Google and Bing)
Below I share my observations over the years.
Google’s advice about most on-page elements and meta tags is a lot clearer than what it was when I first wrote about this topic (back in 2007!).
Does Google Use What Is In Meta Tags For Ranking Pages?
Some search engines once looked for hidden HTML tags like these to help order pages in search engine results pages, but most search engines 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.
In short, Google does not use information in the keywords meta tag or the description meta tag to actually rank pages, but it does use the meta description text to create search snippets. Sometimes.
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 penalise 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. I have built tools that can identify doorway pages, for instance, by analysing meta tags – so Google will certainly be able to do even more.
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