INSIGHTS•4 MIN READ

What is a Meta Tag and Are They Important?

Published on May 30, 2014

Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.

When building your WordPress website and you notice the Meta tag fields under the editor window you may ask yourself, What is a Meta tag and are they important? Let me answer the second question first.

Yes they are important, very important when it comes to getting your webpages and posts to get higher placement in search results. However not all of the Meta tags are important anymore. Only the Title and Description Meta tags are important because that is what Google will look at to determine where you will rank in the search results. Google no longer looks at the Keyword Meta tag.

META TITLE & DESCRIPTION TAGS

Though both are important to the action of someone clicking on your search results, the most important of the two is the Title Meta tag. This is the first thing that is displayed in the Google Search Snippet and where your keyword should reside. You want to make sure that this keyword best represents what your page or post is all about.

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The All in One SEO plugin installed with your Wealthy Affiliate WordPress website will automatically include the page title that you typed in at the top of your editor page as well as the first 160 character spaces of text from your written content. Because of this you will not need to fill in any of the Meta tag fields, as seen in the picture below.

However there will be times when you will want to make your page title a little more interesting for those searching in Google to want to click on it. In the picture below, after I published my page with only my keyword Internet Jobs From Home, I looked at the Preview Snippet and felt that it needed something more to grab a searcher’s attention. So I manually changed the Title Meta tag to say, Internet Jobs From Home – My Personal Favorites.

Another thing to take note of is something that I try to do with every single page and post that I create for my websites, I even did it with this blog. I always try to find a way to write my keyword into the first 160 character spaces of my first paragraph but only if it sounds natural. The reason why I do this is obvious in the above picture. By placing my keyword “internet jobs from home” within the first 160 character space, by default the All in One SEO will place it in the Description Snippet.

However there will be yet another time when you will have to manually change one of the Meta tags from what the All in One SEO will place in it. In the picture below you will see what the beginning of my Wealthy Affiliate review looks like in my WP Edit Post window. By default the All in One SEO will include my keyword “The Wealthy Affiliate Review” in the 60 character spaces of the Title. However by default it will place the first 160 characters of my review into the Description.

Obviously I do not want my Description Snippet to read, “Name: Wealthy Affiliate, Owners: Kyle and Carson, Price: $0.00 for Starter Membership, Rating: 9.8 out of 10, Here is my blog post on The Wealthy Affiliate Revi”. That does not make for an enticing description of what my post is about not to mention that my keyword has the last 2 letters missing from the last word because it is longer than 160 character spaces.

So this is yet another time when manually changing the Description Meta is justified, as seen in the picture below. As we are all taught here at WA and as Google’s Matt Cutts says in many of his blogs and videos, it is very important for your search result rankings that both your Title contains your keywords and your Description provides the best information as to what your page or post is all about.

When you create your content you should always first and foremost think about what information your readers are looking for. Your goal is to provide the best information for your readers and do so with clarity.

Do not make the mistake of thinking about how you will make money from the content you are writing because the content is for your readers and not for your wallet. Again this is taught over and over again here at WA by Kyle and others. Always put your reader’s interest before yours. If you can do that then not only will Google love your content but so will your readers and in turn they just may buy from you.

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