Leading SEO specialists say that, although meta description and keyword tags it have little value with search engines anymore, there is still some little value which is why they themselves put meta keywords and meta description tags in their own website pages. Does it make a difference? It can't be confirmed however experts suggest that you either do an excellent and well educated job of putting your meta tags together on a per page basis or you let search engines figure it out from the content themselves. Doing a poor job of it will only decrease your SEO rankings with the search engines.

Did you know? Because people stuffed their meta description and keywords tags, most search engines now actually place very little value or ignore meta tags completely in favour of understanding the content on its own. That is why it is very important to write great content, well formatted with excellent keywords used repeatedly throughout the content of the page, especially in the page title, higher numbered headers and the content closest to the top of a page.

Here are a few examples of invalid meta description tags:

<meta lang="eng" name="Information goes here." />

<meta description="Information goes here." />

<meta name="description" content="Information goes here.">

The correct syntax is (note that the word "description" must not be substituted):

<meta name="description" content="Information goes here." />

<meta lang="en" name="description" content="Information goes here." />

Similarly, the correct syntax for meta keyword tags is:

<meta name="keywords" content="list, words, keyword" />

<meta lang="en" name="keywords" content="list, words, keyword" />

For additional information, visit the HTML Meta Tag page on the W3schools site.

A Couple of SEO Tips for Meta Tags

The content of these tags should never be more than 160 characters. Always put your most valuable keywords first as some search engines only look at the first 70-90 words.

The language attributes (example: lang="en" or lang="fr") should only be used if the language of meta description or keywords does not match the language of the page. The language of the description and keywords should always match the language of the content of the page. For example, if the content area of an English page is written in Spanish, the meta tags should be specified in Spanish and include lang="es".

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