Meta tags, we probably all know what it is and how it is used by search engines. Let’s assume that we are all the beginners here first. Meta tags present some information about the website to search engines, it can show your website’s keywords, description, author, content type and more to search engines. Among these information, meta keywords and meta description are considered to be two of most important factors affecting your SERPs. To view a web page’s meta description and keywords, open a web page and view the source, you should be able to see something like:
<Meta name=”description” content=”Some meta description here”>
<Meta name=”keywords” content=”meta keywords here”>
In the old days, people almost rely on meta tags to get high rankings. However, people start to abuse it and then search engines soon find out all the tricks. It has been argued that nowadays, meta description and meta keywords has no impact on your ranking and thus we are seeing missing meta tags. It makes sense since it does not affect the rankings. However, in my opinion, we still 100% need meta description and keywords.
If you do a simple search on Google, you will see that all the sites will be showing with a title and description. Then the word or phrase that is in your search term will be highlighted. The description could be either from your meta description or from the content on your page. If you are missing meta description, then the relevant content on your page will be taken. The problem is that do you always have relevant content on your page? Some pages like contact us, support or any other pages that mainly shows images will not have enough content for search engines to determine what your page is about. What happens is that Google may see all of your pages are so similar that it will group your pages into “duplicated results”. Even say you got content on every single page, will you be 100% sure that your site is well structured and coded so that the content will appear as front as possible? Search engines may have difficulties if your do not follow good practice when designing your site.
Other than that, some search engines still make use of meta description and meta keywords when deciding the rank of your page because they are not as sophisticated as Google.
If you are using CMS or any other software building your site, make sure you are given the chance to write unique meta description and keywords for your page. Most often, plugins or extensions are needed. If you are using Php link directory 3.1, (or any other version, but I am not sure about older versions), you will be able to do that without any mods. If you are not familiar for adding meta tags in phpld, read it here : How to add unique meta tags in php link directory
