There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst internet marketing newbies about meta tags and title tags. Just browsing the web I can sense their anxiety…so with that in mind I’d like to take a moment to clarify matters. Hopefully this will help some people sleep better at night.

There are actually quite a few types of meta tags (for a pretty comprehensive list see SubmitCorner’s Guide). But no fear, there are really only two meta tags that 95% of people need to concern themselves with anyways. Theses are the Meta Description and the Meta Keywords. Even more important than these, however, are the Title Tags…so despite the fact that they aren’t technically meta tags, they do serve a similar function. Here we go, from least to most important.

META KEYWORDS: This is the less important of the two meta tags. Years ago, webmasters were able to add meta keywords to their sites that supposedly had relevance to the content. Problems arose when cunning individuals learned to abuse the system by adding numerous, irrelevant keywords to their meta description tags to drawing all kinds of traffic. (It got ugly when porn sites stuffed Disney themed keywords into their meta tags, etc.) So as a result, Google got wise and doesn’t give much (if any) weight to Meta Keywords. Other engines may, however, which makes them worth adding. It certainly won’t hurt, but don’t expect it to really help.

META DESCRIPTIONS: Meta description’s are designed to allow you to give a brief summary of your site’s content for the search engines to crawl. These can help you rank on keywords that you’re targeting. Don’t expect Google to gather and present theses descriptions word for word however in its results, however. Sometimes Google does its own thing and creates its own results descriptions from the content on your page. Adding meta descriptions is certainly worthwhile however.

TITLE TAGS: Besides original content on a site, this is perhaps the most important part of on-page optimization. Having static title tags will hurt your chances of ranking well. An easy way to test if your title tags are static is to do a Google search for site:yoursitehere.com. If each of the titles are unique, great! If not, this is good news as well, because with a little work you can help your site become more visible and better optimized for engine searches. Ensuring that each page on your site has unique title tags that include target keywords will really pay off.