What is a Meta Tag and Are They Important?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.