Yes and No. Meta keywords are not used by google anymore to determine what your web page is about. They have their own algorithm, based on the URL of your page, the title tag, headline and the content. But the meta description is often used by google to provide a short summary of what the page is about directly under the listing in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
So, if you add a meta description, you can decide what the summary contains. Here are a few tips for writing a meta description,
- Create a 150-200 word snippet that is compelling for the searcher to click on from the SERPs.
- Longer descriptions will be truncated by google, but as always, there is no ageement from SEO experts on how long the snippet should be. Google will decide what’s relevant and how long it should be.
- Include your main keyword(s) in the meta description
If you don’t have a meta description for your web page, google will build a summary by extracting what it considers the most relevant information from your page content. It’ll be based on what it thinks your keywords are, in other words, what’s in your title tag, page headline and content. And it could be ugly. I have seen some ‘nonsense’ summaries in the SERPs, which are unlikely to persuade a searcher to click. So, meta descriptions are worth doing.
I use thesis as my wordpress blog template, which has an entry box for meta keywords and meta description, when I am writing my new post. So, it’s easy for me to add them, which I do for all my articles. I add 2 or 3 keywords to meta keywords and usually the first paragraph of my article, which always has my main keyword(s) included. When I look at my articles on google’s SERPs, the meta description I created is usually shown.
In today’ video Lisa Irby from 2createawebsite shows you how to write your meta tags and description in HTML. Lisa does this with a simple text editor. To add them to your webpage, you will need a html editor, such as dreamweaver. But if you don’t aready have dreamweaver, it will cost you. A great, easy-to-use and free alternative is HTML-Kit.
Meta tags are still worth doing for your webpages.
