It is widely known that Keyword Meta Tags no longer help with search engine optimization (SEO).
Years ago, website owners were ‘stuffing’ their website pages with the same keyword Meta tags (i.e. ‘blog building’, ‘blog building for men’, ‘blog building for women’ (and 100’s more!)) in order to improve their ranking.
And it worked…for a while.
Google caught up and changed their search engine algorithm.
But there is one Meta tag that you must use for Search Engine Optimization
The Description Meta Tag.
The description Meta tag should be used and it should describe what the website page is about. And remember to use your targetted keywords when relevant.
It is displayed in search engine results and should entice the ‘searcher’ to click on the link and visit your site.
Your website page description should not exceed 156 characters as that is the number that Google displays in the search engine results.
How To Add The Description Meta Tag
The easiest way is to use a plugin. Either Yoast’s WordPress SEO or the All-In-One-Seo-Pack
Both of these add another section when editing a page or post via your WordPress Dashboard.
See the images below.
Yoast’s SEO Plugin
All In One SEO Plugin
Simply add your description in the appropriate box.
Andrew is a website builder and helps small businesses with their on-line presence…so they can grow their customer list and increase sales. That’s it! That’s what we do each and every day.
I know meta tags are important even though many of SEO’s dont accept it, but no matter what – most of the sites or blogs i view are actually using it..
Also I myself use Yoast plugin, its easy and effective
Meta tags or Meta elements are used with HTML code; these are used to give a certain type of structure called metadata to a web page. Thanks for sharing such valuable information.
Yes, I do agree with the point that meta tags play very important role. Very informative article dude.
Thanks for mentioning seo by yoast plugin. that plugin is so fantastic and i cant do without it. Meta description is still very useful even if it’s not a criteria to rank, it is what will explain your page to users who search for that keyword. You may rank high, but if your description is not good enough, you might not get any traffic from ranking high.
I only recently found out about how “dangerous” it can actually be to use the keywords meta tag – most search engines don’t use it at all, and Bing actually uses it to detect spam sites. Best to leave that one blank.
Thanks for the tips on the Description meta tag – I thought the limit for Google was 160 so I’ll be more watchful with the length from now on. I use the All In One plugin and it works great because I heard Yoast’s can cause trouble with Hostgator.
I am using Yoast from many days. Working fine with my blog. Must us. Also the All in one seo Pack is good.
I use All in 1 SEO Pack which helps me to add title with a short description. This shows in all search engine which tells readers about the article. It is the best way for SEO technique
Yup a meta tag is very important for an post…it must be relevant with limited words , the meta tags are which tells about the website to the people who come in search in search engine
Hey Andrew,
Nice post and Yes, description meta tag really helpful in attracting readers and drives traffic to our blog. For description meta tag, I used WordPress SEO plugin by yoast and it works just amazing. Thanks for sharing this post. this post really gonna help all the newbies.
Meta tags are not completely dead. It is true that it no longer helps the sites to get ranked or found by search engine. Meta tags and meta description is very important to users as well as search engines to know about the website in few words.
They are the basic points in the search engine optimization techniques. I mainly use All in one seo plug-in in wordpress for managing all the meta tags.and other keywords.
Thank you for sharing.