Rethinking your meta-tags

By Wes | July 14th, 2010

Though you may have hired the most brilliant and cunning team of website developers and SEO strategists to optimize your site back when it was brand new, it’s never a bad idea to revisit your meta-tags or site description and consider tweaking them once in a while. Here’s why.

The world is not a static and unchanging place so neither should your meta-tags be. The economy swings and stumbles, interest rates rise and fall, and spending habits can quickly change. This means that online search habits also quickly change. To condense meta-tags into a simple analogy think of them like advertisements. These are the things that bots and spiders are out there looking for on behalf of users, eager to find your service through search engines. They’re not the only thing to consider in SEO by any stretch of the imagination, but they are one of the easiest to monkey with and can yield results.

I recently encouraged a friend who operates a popular tourist destination to do exactly this, as the meta-tags for their website had not been changed in years. Back when the average tourist thought they had a lot of money thanks to sub-prime mortgages and endless magic credit, people thought the gravy train would never slow down- and so searching for fancy stuff was all the rage. Now that millions of tourists found out they’re actually piss poor and frantically climbing out of debt, searching for cheap stuff has become popular once again. So for this particular tourist destination including words and phrases like “BC tourism deals” or ‘BC affordable tourist destination’ or ‘best free travel spots’ (as some of this destination had free attractions) might be good in lieu of some of the other nondescript tags that had been there for a while. Then when times are good, consumer habits change again, he could adjust them again.Your page description is also something worth re-examining on occasion and should be consistent with keywords and meta-tags so as not to confuse spiders and bots who may then consider you spam.

SO it’s good to re-examine your site’s back end and meta-tags now and then. These changes are pretty straightforward and easy to do, but they should be well thought out. If you’re not sure about what kind of changes to make, ask an SEO specialist. There are other tags to consider (author, copyright, robot) and your site description should be consistent with your keywords and meta-tags otherwise, I stress once more, your site may risk being mistaken for spam. So for a more detailed exploration you can head here.

On the topic of change, and spam, I would also like to introduce a new feature on the Senses Blog which includes brilliant quotes from our Spam filter. This week’s top Spam comment is:

“The article is very wonderful. You analyse in the round. I will go on to attention your other wonderful posts. …” written in response to Tips for Small Business Blogging: Editorial Calendars

Have a custom web application you need built? Contact Thirdi today!

Tags: credit crisis, keywords, meta-tags, SEO strategy, site description, sub-prime mortgages, tourism

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 9:09 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Boris

You must realize that Google ignores meta tags for the purposes of placing the search result, right? I wouldn't be surprised if all engines ignore them these days except for 'description'.
Keith

Boris, you're missing the core fundamental idea behind SEO. Optimize for humans, not for Google. Whether or not Google ignores the meta description is besides the point, the meta description tag is the first line of marketing when your result appears in the SERPs. Human beings read that and click on the link they find most suits their query... Google doesn't click anywhere. It can't. Its a robot.