To meta or not to meta? That is the question.

As promised, here is a first post by guest blogger Louise Desmarais from Mud Creative. We’re looking forward to reading Louise’s tips and advice on search engine optimization and writing copy for the web.
– Christine

Oh, those temperamental search engines. It used to be that meta tags (information about a web page that is not visible on the browser) were the sweet spot to bait search engine spiders. Now it seems they are more attracted to the title tag (the words that appear in the grey/blue bar at the very top of the browser window). Does that mean we don’t have to worry about meta tags anymore?

You could do without it, but then you might be missing out on an opportunity to influence how your web site page is described in the search engine results page (SERPs). Jill Whalen of High Rankings says, “It’s important to note that the search engines are always playing around with what they display as the descriptions for any given URL in the search engine results pages, so you may see something other than what I see.”

In other words, sometimes the engines draw from the visible page content, and sometimes from the meta tag information – even if it doesn’t have keyphrases in it. So, if there was nothing in your meta tag, the engine may draw from other places, like alt tags on photos or random blog copy, which probably doesn’t say enough about your website. Your best bet is to cover the bases with good meta tags that accurately reflect your page and entice the visitor to drop in for a closer look.