Back in the early 90s, in the pioneering time of Search Engines Optimization meta-tags were the most importance factor when it came about optimizing a page. At that time it was enough to spam your title, description and keywords meta-tags with tons of keywords and rank on top of search engines for most of them. However, as the time passed, search engines algorithm evolved and more and more factors started to be taken in consideration so the importance of the meta-tags constantly dropped over time.

The only one meta-tag that remained very important over the time is the title tag (). In fact it is not a meta-tag, but a simple HTML tag, but there are quite a lot of people that consider it as a meta-tag so I mentioned it too. It is important not only for the SEO value it carries (which is quite high), but also for the fact that it appears on SERPS and is the most important factor that affects the CTR ration. When writing titles for your pages you should have a few things in mind: it should be user friendly (so people will actually click it and come to your site), it should include the keywords (so it helps the rankings) and it shouldn’t be too long. An example of good title for a library called “Book Lovers” and located in Boston would be: “Book Lovers – best library in Boston” or “Book Lovers – your favorite Boston library”.

The description meta-tag () is the second most important meta-tag. Again it not only cares some SEO value, but it also appears on SERPS and affects drastically the CTR. Considering that it’s most important role is to increase the CTR and not to carry SEO value I highly recommend you to write it for visitors and not for search engines. If you mention your main keyword it’s enough from a pure SEO perspective. An example of good description for the same Boston library would be: “Book Lovers is one of Boston’s best libraries; we aim to be the first library where you can find the newest book edition.”

The keywords meta-tag () carries nowadays only a minimal SEO value and a lot of SEO experts even ignore it. However, if you’re like me, someone who considers that every bit counts you may want to add it to your site. However be careful to not spam it – use only 3-4 keywords and be sure that those keywords also exist in the page’s text. To continue with our previous example some good keywords would be: “Book Lovers”, “library”, “Boston”.

Any other meta-tag carries no SEO value anymore and using them will only make your pages heavier; so I highly recommend you to stick only with title, description and keywords meta-tags. If you want you can even use only the title meta-tag for your inner page (there are a lot of SEO experts that do so). But, under no circumstances, don’t copy the same title, description and keywords on all your pages because this may lead to a penalty; and I’m sure that this is the last thing you want to happen to your site.

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