SEO Tips by Steve

Optimizing the meta tags of the pages on your website has been common practice since the dawn of SEO. However, there is much debate over the importance of such tags and some question their existence altogether. So, do meta tags work? The answer is sometimes. Search engines learned very quickly that people abused and manipulated the meta tags on their web pages to influence rankings in their favor, or sometimes to try to rank highly for totally irrelevant terms. We're talking about meta description and meta keyword tags. So now if you don't have perfect meta tags in the pages on your website than you're better off removing them altogether... and here is why:

• Search engines know people manipulate meta tags so they look for clues to your intentions. If they think you repeat keywords too many times (keyword density too high), or there are terms in your meta keywords tag that do not appear on the page than they will penalize that page and drop its rankings.

To avoid being penalized by the search engines try following the guidelines below when creating the meta tags for all of your web pages:

• meta description tag should be approximately 20 words long (this is roughly how many words appear in the descriptions on search results) - make sure your 20 word description makes sense if someone is reading it.
• repeat the primary keyword for a specific page two times in the meta description tag.
• the meta keywords tag should only include words and phrases that are visible on the page. when in doubt leave a keyword out. nothing bad will happen if you forget to include a relevant word, but if you add any that are questionable chances are your page will be penalized.

The above guidelines are for those who value meta tags and treat them as a necessity to any SEO campaign. I however believe that you no longer need meta tags on your web pages, and that you can actually achieve higher rankings by leaving them out.

I've tested this theory with multiple websites and have seen the same results from all of them. All that happens when you leave out meta tags is the search engines look at the on-page content and pull excerpts of text pertaining to the search phrase. And by leaving out the tags the search engines know that you are not trying to manipulate your page in any way.

Final verdict: leave out the meta tags on your next project and instead spend extra time on the copy... making sure to include variations of keyword phrases in the visible text on every page. Chances are you'll achieve higher rankings using this method of optimization.