17 September 2022

What Significance Are Keywords And Meta Tags To You.

By Rahul Garg

Keywords and Meta Tags are those components that help bring traffic to your site. But how many of you thought that keywords and meta keywords were the same thing? I thought they were for a while but found out there is a difference between the two. In this post I will explain these differences and their significance in generating traffic online!

To many bloggers, tags and keywords can seem like the same thing but their uses are for different purposes.

It’s human nature to miss the meaning and purpose of something although we tend to put our own definition on it. When we were kids, that’s what we did a lot. Especially if we mispronounce words that mean something else!

I can remember as a kid, I was chastised for one word in particular. It was the word FORK.

As a kid, especially if you’re between the ages of 2 and 5 years old, it’s inevitable that your’e going to mispronounce many words while you’re trying to figure out the environment around you. It’s up to your parents to correct you and teach you about your surroundings for you to get along when you’re older.

Anyways, I can remember that I used a spoon for everything when dinnertime rolled around? Why? I use to mispronounce FORK a lot. Instead of saying FORK as it’s pronounced, I use to say it as the F Word!!! At that time I didn’t understand why this word was so bad. It was all the same to me!

So in turn, I gave up, and started asking for a spoon for everything. At least I could say this right!

But as you grow up you find out the meaning of what your immediate environment give terms. With this adjustment you’re able to mesh with other people a lot better.

But isn’t true with a lot of these internet terms?

I pretty much thought that keywords and meta tags were the same up until I read about meta keywords and the meta description. That’s where the confusion started to unveil itself!

So let’s find out their differences… First lets focus on what a Meta Tag is.

Table of Contents

What Is A Meta Tag?

One of the best things you can do for your blog is to have a search field. This makes it easier for your readers to search for topics within your blog. Especially if you have over 50 blog posts!

This definitely helps with traffic and also in lowering your bounce rate.

So what’s really the actual means to find those different subjects within your blog?

That’s where TAGS come in!

They are often called “Categories”, but they are the ones that makes it easier for your readers to find certain content within your entire blog. If you use WORDPRESS you can add tags to the right of the content you create.

When you put the word Meta in front of Tags then this is geared only for the search engines. It is the Data (Description, Keywords, Author, Content Type, Title, etc…) that the major search engines use to determine how to rank and show what relevant results to show that particular user when they do a search for a specific topic..

For example, a website written in HTML code will have these different meta tags in them. You will usually find them between the <Head> tags within the HTML document.

Nice techie jargon huh? Well all you have to remember is that Meta Tags are for search engines and nothing else!

Now this brings us to two common Meta Tags that you will see quite often mentioned on blog posts about generating traffic:

Meta Descriptions
Meta Keywords

When I first saw these two terms I thought great, more ways to help my blog generate traffic, but how do I implement. I also asked aren’t Meta Keywords the same as Keywords?

Well lets get into a little more detail about these specific Meta Tags…

Meta Description

A meta description describes or gives you a brief summary of what the website or blog post is going to be about. If you’re doing a search on Google for let’s say On Page SEO then Google will show you the Meta Description right under the Title as you see here below.

There are some rules and best practices to follow when you enter your meta description in your website or blog:

You can have up to around 150 Characters
Make sure that your Keyword is included within the Description
Give your readers a reason why they will find your post or site valuable
Make sure that the description is in correlation with the Title
Make sure the keyword you used in the Title is also included in the description

Meta Keywords

These are the keywords that only the search engines can see and are invisible to your readers. Not to get you confused with Keywords that you would see in a Title.

FYI: Now days Meta Keywords aren’t used by Google or Bing, but are used in smaller search engines.

Also there are a couple of guidelines for Meta Keywords

These are the keywords you would put in your tags (which I mentioned above)
Separate the keywords with commas
To get better results use long tail keywords (Keywords that are longer than one word)

I go a little more in detail about keywords and how often they should be mentioned without you getting penalized.

How Can You Implement the Meta Description and Meta Keywords

Meta Tags are one of the ways to help you rank well and generate traffic to your sites. But the next question that many may have is how can you implement them?

As far as WordPress is concern there a couple of ways. I showed you already how to add Meta Keywords through the tags in WordPress, but how about the Meta Description?

If you’re comfortable with Coding, you can go to the Header.php

If you don’t use Genesis Framework

Click on Appearance
Click on Editor
Click on Header.php on right side

After the line

You can add this code

And Voila! This is where you add the Meta Description

FYI: Just to let you know, I got these images from an old wordpress.org forum written 7 years ago from this date by a member named MichaelH since I’m using the Genesis Framework and Child Theme.

The other way is using a plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast

Here’s a great video I found on how to set up the Meta Description

As I mentioned before using Keywords and Meta Tags are just a couple of ways to add to the puzzle of generating traffic from Search Engines. There are still many other ways of doing it, with social and engaging being the ones taking the bulk of it!