It is a myth that meta tags and keywords don't matter.  Meta tags are a critical part of SEO. Selecting the right ones can make or break your real estate blog or website's ability to break into the SERPS.  The process isn't difficult, but there are rules to it, so let's delve into what meta tags are, how they are used by various search engines and how you can easily select the right ones to catapult your blog or site into Internet superstardom.

What is a meta tag?

Meta elements are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements are placed as tags in the head section of an HTML document.

The importance of meta tags in SEO

The two most common uses of meta elements on the Web are to provide a description and to provide meta keywords for a web page. This data may then be used by search engines (such as Google or Yahoo!) to generate and display a list of search results matching a given query.

In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a web page. Webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines - and thus, high traffic to the web site.  As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a web site. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.

In the early 2000s, search engines, specifically, Google, veered away from reliance on meta elements alone (and the myth that meta tags don't matter was born) since many web sites used inappropriate meta keywords or a technique known as keyword stuffing, in order to increase their search engine ranking. Some search engines still use meta elements alone when delivering results, though most of the major search engines focus on the keyword, description and title tags' overall relevance to the content on the page rather than relying on the meta data alone to determine what a page is about. Currently, Google does not use meta elements to index web sites; however Google does use text from the meta description in search results pages as the snippet of text that it displays, if terms queried appear in that description. And, Google will look at keyword relevancy to content when determining how relevant results are and how they should be displayed int he SERPs.  So, the myth that keywords and meta data aren't important to Google is busted!  Conversely, both MSN and Yahoo! do use meta data in indexing AND returning results.  Therefore, including specific, unique and relevant meta data for each page of your real estate blog or website is important to your overal SEO and SERP positioning.

Read also: How different search engines use meta tags

The history of meta tag importance

Just a few years ago meta tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization. Back then, where you placed in the search results was directly correlated to what you placed in your keyword, description and title tags. Wow, wasn't SEO easy then? So, what happened? A bunch of devious web designers used black hat SEO methods to manipulate search engine positioning for even the most innocent of searches by placing unrelated information in their meta data in order to unfairly manipulate their. The result? Spammers, adult content sites and the like placed more highly in searches for everyday products than those sites you would expect to see. For example, and this is only an example- if one were to innocently search for "cape coral real estate" you might have found sites for "hot Asian chicks" and "discount Xenical" to appear higher than BestCapeCoralRealty. However, algorithms got better and today the importance of meta data has changed.  The overall relevancy of keywords, title tags and descriptions is what counts to search engines not simply the existance of the keywords.  Basically, engines rate the quality of a page based on it's content relevancy to meta tags and no longer take the word of the meta alone to figure out what a page is about.  

Common meta tag mistakes

1. Not using them on each page. The most important meta tags for search engines are: Keywords, Description, Title, & Robots.

2. Using the same meta tags on each page. Repeating your meta data across all your pages is wasting an opportunity to provide a search engine with searchable information.

3. Not checking your meta data relevancy and posting data that could actually harm your results positioning.

4. Improperly formed meta tags.  Search engines can't read invalidated HTML, so make sure your HTML/XHTML validates! 

Read also: Validating your real estate blog or website

Important meta tags

1. Description tag: gives a description of your site and directs search engines as to what the primary themes of the site are and which topics your Web site is relevant to. Each page should have its own unique description which is relevant to that specific page. I typically recommend selecting one sentence in the post that best describes the entire content.

2. Keywords: keywords tell engines which search terms users are likely to search for your pages by. Keywords should be relevant to the content on the page and specific to each page. Never repeat keyword lists from page to page. That is a common and deadly mistake. Keywords are one of the primary ways search enginesdetermine the significance of your page to the serach string, so do not forget this tag!

Tool: use this NUAH tool to run a full keyword/description report on your real estate blog or website.

Tool: RSS Pieces 100% Yahoo! relevancy keyword term extraction selector tool.  Be sure to select term extraction to pullback the keywrods.  Selecting "keywords" will only pull back the current keywords on thepage.

3. Robots: The meta Robots tag deserves more attention. In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don't want it indexed. Listing these pages in the meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed. 

FACT: Google does not always follow the directions of the "no follow" tag. 

4. Title: The title tag should be included as search engines look at this tag for indexing as well. Title tags should be specific to the website and page. Common ways to list the title tag are Page Name: Article Title. You can be specific and wordy in a title tag.  Be sure to include keywords in your title tag to help with better indexing.

Tool: Widexl’s meta data analyzer is the best free tool available on the Internet for identifying meta data errors. It covers keywords, title and description tags while also providing your keyword density and much more.

How to check your meta tag relevancy

Always check your work. There is nothing worse than spending a whole bunch of time having SEOed a site to find that you included poison words in your meta data or put too many keywords in.

Tool: There are plenty of analyzers out there, I prefer widexl because it seems to have the most complete analytics tool out there.

So, this all sounds like such a pain, right? Well, if you had an RSS Pieces Real Estate Blog, all this tedious keyword tagging is done for you, automatically, behind the scenes by our patent-pending technologies.

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