The Significance of Metadata

Are you going crazy optimizing your website and looking for those 7 or so specific keywords to put in your Metadata Keywords tag?

Well, stop.

The Metadata of a website can contain numerous values, but it has long been held that there are three that are key to success: Title, Description and Keywords.

Title Tag
The 'title tag' is the metadata value that appears as the title of the webpage in the search engine results pages. It's true purpose is to get visitors to your website. While changing the position of words or changing words in a title tag can have a profound effect on the webpage's positions in the search engine results pages, it may surprise you to know that it can be inconsequential. For example, if your webpage content is focused on 'umbrellas' and your title tag is 'Oreo Cookies Recipes', search engines will index the page relative to umbrellas. If you omit the title tag (not a good thing to do by the way), search engines will still index the page relative to the content.

Description Tag
The 'description tag' is the metadata value that succulently describes the subject matter of the content on the page. Search engines such as Google optionally determine whether to use your description, and more frequently provide the description sometimes acquiring it from a not-for-profit directory (http://www.dmoz.org/). A description tag is no longer required; the first paragraph content on each page of your website should sufficiently provide a description of that page's content.

Keywords Tag
The 'keywords tag' is the metadata value that lists the keywords for which you hope to optimize the page for and get it indexed on with the search engines, but it is a rather useless tag for search engines as few use the tag. Google does not use the keywords tag. Directories sometimes use the keywords tag.