How Meta Tags should be used for SEO

Meta tagsIn my previous post ‘What search engine crawlers do with your Meta tags’, I talked about it’s depreciating usage. It’s not as powerful and useful as it once was. Some say that it’s still handy and some say otherwise. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how SEO experts nowadays use Meta tags for their websites.

Meta tags are words in your code which users will not be able to see. It’s effect on SEO has become less and less over the years due to the abuse of webmasters in stuffing keywords inside the meta tags. It used to affect rankings, now it doesn’t. It used to be a factor in the retrieval of the indexed site, now only 2 search engines are left practicing that. But SEO experts, according to Danny Sullivan still do use it for things we might not have been able to think of. So how does SEO experts use Meta tags?

SEO Experts use Meta tags for Misspellings

Since we already know that Yahoo and Ask uses Meta tags to at least retrieve or recall indexed information, you would want to use your meta tags to target people who might misspell your keywords with their search engine query. Putting misspelled keywords in your site’s visible content would be embarrassing and would look quite unprofessional. Here’s your chance to get those misspellers into your website – put the misspelled keywords in your meta tags.

Misspellers are most probably looking for the right thing any way, it’s just that they didn’t do too well in their english spelling subject. Which means that they are still potential conversions for you! You just need to exert a little extra effort in helping them out with their spelling bee score in Google.

SEO Experts use Meta tags for Synonyms

Using synonyms in your site is something that we all do. But we try to minimize using it because we want to focus on our keywords and try to populate our content with it. SEO experts sometimes leave the synonyms in the meta tags in order for them to get traffic from people who aren’t directly using their keywords but are probably looking for the same thing. Although it would still be much better if you use these words inside the body of your content to enable all search engines to read it.

SEO Experts use Meta tags for textless pages

There are still websites which are design and entertainment oriented. These are the kind of sites which packs a lot of flash and pictures and very few to no text at all. In cases like this, meta tags would be helpful. 2 search engines being able to find you is better than no search engine visibility at all. That is exactly why we want content in a website – although that’s another topic altogether.

So there you have it, these three are some of the ways that an SEO expert uses meta tags. It’s not much, but you’d want every little detail to help in SEO.

Tips for keeps: Study any possible misspellings with your site’s keywords and try to experiment with the meta keywords and see what happens. It won’t hurt to go the extra mile to get a little more targeted traffic.

This entry is part of the SEO Hacker School series: Using Meta Tags for SEO

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Next Lesson: What Meta Robots Tag are for

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Sean Si

About Sean

is a Filipino motivational speaker and a Leadership Speaker in the Philippines. He is the head honcho and editor-in-chief of SEO Hacker. He does SEO Services for companies in the Philippines and Abroad. Connect with him at Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. He’s also the founder of Sigil Digital Marketing. Check out his new project, Aquascape Philippines.