By zack
Many website owners believe the secret to good SEO is in the meta tags in the HTML head. But do meta tags actually matter?
Short answer: Yes and No
Meta Keywords
To put it bluntly, if you are chalking your meta keywords tag full of words and phrases you want to target for search results, you are wasting your time. Google ignores these. Don’t believe me? Just ask Google:
Google Does Not Use Keywords Meta Tag
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU]
Meta Description
What about the description meta tag? That is a bit more complicated. While the description tag does not directly affect your Google search result ranking for any keywords, it does help in the SERP, or Search Engine Results Page. What happens is that when people search on Google, each result contains the main title as the link, and then a short description underneath. Where does this description come from? Well, if you have a description meta tag, that’s where! So the value in this tag is to have a succinct and keyword-targeted description of your funeral home, so that searchers immediately see your site as one that they want to click on in the search results.
Google even conveniently bolds the keywords that were searched on which occur in your description. The more matches, the more likely the searcher is going to see your page as a good result and click through!
Conclusion
The next time a web developer tries to convince you to toss every related keyword into the keywords meta tag, think twice about whether that developer is worth his or her SEO salt!
