If you have had a website designed then it is likely your web designer will have mentioned SEO. If they are experienced in SEO you will probably have got good advice. However many will focus on the onsite factors and in particular your meta tags. This article will consider what your meta tags are and whether they are important.

What are Meta Tags?

These are some elements of your coding that give information on your web page. There are 3 main types and we will describe each of them below:

1. Title Tag - This is no technically a meta tag but should be considered along with it. Basically it is the title of your web page. When you look at your browser this will appear at the top of it to give the visitor information about the page they are on.

2. Meta Description - This is a description that you put into the code of the web page and will describe what the page is about. This will not appear to any visitors to your website.

3. Meta Keywords - This is a list of your keywords for your web page. Again these appear in the coding of your website and do not appear to any visitors to your website.

Are the Meta Tags Important?

Now you know what the meta tags are you need to consider whether they are important and the role they will play in your SEO efforts. Again we have listed the 3 tags above and explained the benefits of each of them:

1. Title Tag - This will be quite an important part to your SEO campaign and it is important to include your keywords here. As with your visitors the search engines will read your title tag to find your what your web page is about. For that reason you should always make sure you include your main keyword here.

2. Meta Description - This will not be good for your SEO campaign directly. There was a time when search engines would use this to rank website however due to abuse from webmasters they stopped using it. However it is still important to write it properly as it can be used by visitors. The reason for this is that search engines will use it in their results as the small description about your site. For that reason you should make sure it is appealing and will pull people into your website.

3. Meta Keywords - Again there was a time when this was really important to your rankings. However this is now a completely defunct tag and has no benefit at all. This is for the same reason as the meta description and so search engines have decided to ignore it.

You will see from the above that there are some benefits to your meta tags but on the whole they are a very small part of any SEO campaign. For that reason you should be very wary of anyone suggesting you can get to the top of the search engines just by working on your meta tags. We agree that there was a time when this would have been true however as search engines have got more advanced so have their ranking factors. Things that at one time we vital are now just extra additions that are useful.