The importance of Meta tags in SEO has been a much debated issue for a long time. But it's generally agreed that meta tags are not to be ignored at all. Search engines still pay some attention to them, especially to the title and description meta tags. Google's recently launched Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide offers us some clues on how Google views these tags.

Google's suggestions emphasize the importance of the title tag and the description meta tag for search engine placement. The following major guidelines re-affirm what SEO experts uphold as best practices and they've offered some fresh insights for me:

Use unique, accurate title tags for each page
The title tag proves to be the most important meta tag. Besides affecting your ranking, it'll have a great impact on the Click Thru Rate to your site. The text you put here appear as the link text in the Google result page– the bit that people will read first and click on. 

Google recommends using a title which accurately describes the page's content.Creating unique title tags for each page which briefly describes the focus of that page will help both the user and Google. It helps in determining how the page is distinct from others in your site. I've come across a few sites using extremely lengthy titles stuffed with keywords. This cannot help them as Google usually shows only a portion(nearly sixty characters) of such a title.

Use description meta tags effectively
The tag that comes next in importance is the description tag. Most search engines use it as a brief summary of your web page. In the search engine results page (SERP), it appears as the snapshot of your site, just below the title. 

The content for it should be as compelling and informative as an ad copy.Google recommends using unique descriptions for each page, accurately summarising the page's content. Here also, stuffing keywords in extremely lengthy paragraphs will be of no use as Google displays only about 160 characters including spaces.

If you want Google to use the exact description that you've written in your Meta description tag, your targeted keyword/s should be used in the description tag . Otherwise, Google may take a snippet of content that does a good job of matching up with the user's query. Most of the time, I've found such content a little bit obscure and unattractive.

Tags: SERP | google

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