Meta Tags – Customer Invitations and Search Hints
In the early days of search engines, the keyword tag was used by the search engine to determine the search terms for that page. Web sites soon began to abuse this by putting completely unrelated terms in this tag so that their page could be found for popularly searched values. The search engines then evolved and created their own algorithms for determining the search terms based on the content of the site. For the most part, this tag no longer has much impact except with smaller search engines, and there is an argument that its only function is to let your competitors know what values you are targeting. I would continue to populate the keywords tag but mostly with more obscure terms that are relevant but you couldn’t easily fit into your content such as geographical terms or misspells. Repeating the terms doesn’t help; simply comma or space separate 15 to 25 terms per page.
<meta name=”keywords” content = “seo, search engine, optimization, st louis, stl, saint louis, missouri, optimisation, mo, chesterfield”>
The description tag is another matter altogether. At one time, it was very important for search optimization. You wanted to make sure you had the right terms in the right order. Now, the SEO purpose has mostly gone by the wayside due to the improvements in the search engines.
The search engines now often use a snippet of content from your website for populating their search results (along with your page title). This has often proven to be an excellent context for that term. However, they still may use your meta description for the body of the results displayed to their users, and this has a very important impact on people coming to your site. In the example below, Google uses the description meta tag from the http://www.unidev.com site for the body of the search results. I count about 136 characters or so which are displayed by Google. Obviously, using this text to clearly describe and “invite” the searcher to your site is an important task.
Unidev Google Results