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SEO Mistake #5: Obsessing Over Meta Tags

"Meta tags are so 1995."

Even so, you’ll still find a few web designers, programmers and unscrupulous SEO “professionals” who’ll insist that, in order to optimize your site for the search engines, all you need to do is fill your keyword and description meta tags with all your relevant keywords (and then some) – and keep an eye on your PageRank.

If you’re new to this search engine optimization business, you probably have no idea what a meta tag or PageRank is. Here are a couple of definitions, just for you:

Meta Tag: These are tags placed in the head of your HTML pages that give the visitor’s browser, or the search engine spider, information about the page. Two mid-90s search engines, Infoseek (now defunct) and AltaVista (now owned by Yahoo!), first popularized the keywords tag, which they used to determine what each page on a website was about.

However, by 1997, search engines realized that spammers were misusing the tag to make pages rank for terms that were completely irrelevant to the page’s content. Search engines completely stopped giving so much weight to the keyword meta tag information by 2002.

That said, the description tag is still important. It does not affect how your page is ranked, or what keyword phrases your page will appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for, but the meta description tag is displayed under your page’s title in some of the SERPs.

We'll cover page rank in the next article. In the meantime, stop on by the new Volition website and get a jump with your own personalized site review.