We keep hearing from the “experts” that meta tags are not important. Try telling that to our clients who temporarily lost their rankings because they were messing with their meta tags!  We have seen time and time again where changes to just the title tag can change your rankings.  We have seen dramatic rankings increase when we go in and optimize our clients’ pages.   We’ve even written a few articles on optimizing web pages and what to look for so clients can troubleshoot their site themselves. It’s that important.

Title tags continue to be the most important meta tag to consider. Each page should have its own title tag. Include one complete instance of your keyword phrase in your title tag. Why? Well, two reasons. First, this is important to all three major search engines. Second, this is what normally shows up in the listings displayed on search engine results.

Even alt tags are important, yet often overlooked by those creating web pages. A good alt tag is very important and easy to include in your website. In this article in particular, a test revealed that an image link with an optimized anchor text is more valuable than a text link with an anchor text that is not optimized very well.

While there are programs out there that will help you generate meta tags for your sites, we feel its best you do this manually to make sure you are fully optimizing all components.

Remember, search engine optimization is about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like nominal improvements, but when combined with other onsite optimization tactics, they could have a notable impact on your site’s performance in organic search results. And doesn’t everyone want that?