Let's first talk about what Meta Tags are and what they are not. Meta Tags are not the silver bullet to get you the to top of search results. Filling out your Meta Data will not cause you to go from page 30 to page 1 for a keyword. What Meta Tags will do, Meta Tags will help search engines display the content on your page in a legible format. Let's take a look at where a search engine like Google uses meta tags.
In this example we searched for keywords Nursery Signage you can see on the search results page the main line is the Meta Title or your page title. If google deems your page title better than your meta title they will default to your page title. The next snippet is your URL. The final part is Meta Description or a random snippet of text from the page
Now where can Meta Data help your search rankings? One of the ways your page is ranked is based on bounce rate. Are people landing on a page and leaving without interacting with your site? An easy way to help with bounce rate is to make sure your meta descriptions are accurate and well written. Giving the searcher a good idea of what to expect on the page when they click the link. Keeping your bounce rate low will help you climb in search results.
One thing I see often when doing a site evaluation is duplicate Meta tags. You don't want to use the same title tags or description tags. When search engines crawl your site they don't want to see duplicate tags so make sure you're keeping your tags unique.
Got questions on how you should be using meta tags or want us to do a site evaluations? Give us a call or send us an email.