How much time should I spend on meta tags, and which ones matter?



How much time should I spend on meta tags, and which ones matter? Matt Cutts, Bay Area, California

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42 thoughts on “How much time should I spend on meta tags, and which ones matter?”

  1. Seems like a lot of these videos could be revisited since I'm looking for answers on SEO, meta, etc, but these questions were asked almost 6 years ago and I don't know if they are still relevant so even after watching this I still feel compelled to keep searching the internet for a more recent answer.

  2. Can I ask you with meta-tags, I have a photography site hosted by site specializing in hosting for photographers. they insist on showing meta tags under each image, plus showing my meta description on each page, they say without it Google will penalize site which is new to me. It makes my site look amateurish. there is a script I can use to hide tags from showing and description. from what you have said tags don't matter no more and you would know so Im happy to just take them out all together rather than hide them with code but if I hide the description from my site with code will it cause a Google penalty like the image hosting company states. Also they also add letters and syllables instead of my image name claiming its for security they do says that Google will still find it as an alt tag but so far the only one I have seen come up is the image with there strange letters. so where I name an image to be descriptive like name of landscape for example one image I named The_Great_Mewstone _South_Devon but they they change it to i-Dg6j8fH nether is being seen by Google though I have only uploaded it a couple of days ago.

  3. <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="Description" CONTENT="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: £9.24, Length: 784 pages">
    <meta name="google-site-verification" content="+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl23908vVuFHs34="/>
    <title>Example Books – high-quality used books for children</title>
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

  4. would love to see the meta description used on my pages, most of the time the snippet chosen is some random (and generally poor choice) snippet – out of context and just featuring the words. Rarely does the snippet help promote the site at all as it is often something odd like the navigation menu or worse. Be great if there was some way in google webmaster to indicate a preference for the actual description to be used for the page and not a random snippet

  5. Yes, Matt, meta tags do matter for letting visitors know what the page Google brings is all about at. And as you said if it is well written and compelling then CTR does in fact increase.

  6. come on you can't change everything all the time..in this way you confused the people instead to help them..google is a service for the people..not to work the people whith changes every month as google wish..you cant make rules by your own..there got a be some global rules

  7. The meta description is a good foot in teh door tool for those who konws how to use it. Do it right, then people will come clicking your link. But if you make it boring and seem irrelevant to what they are looking for, then you'll end up with zero clicks!

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  11. Yes. It matters from an indexing point-of-view because whatever words appear in the description are considered towards relevance. And it matters from a user point-of-view because a good description is likely to attract more clicks from the search results.

  12. @MichaelDadona Use both! The meta description is a human-readable overview of what a page is about, while schema.org markup is machine-readable information that can be used in various ways, including rich snippets.

  13. @MichaelDadona Most commonly, because the user's query is better helped by showing the relevant parts of the page (where the keywords appear) instead of the generic meta description. Try doing a site: search. It could also be that your description is low-quality (too short, duplicate, spammy). There are other possible issues like your page being blocked by robots.txt, but I assume that's not your case.

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