The good, the bad, and the ugly
There is a myth about the keyword’s meta tag that needs to be dispelled in the Web development community. For some time it has been seen as an important part of any SEO initiative, but none of the major search engines see the keyword’s meta tag as a reliable means of determining the content of a page, and don’t even look at it. In the mid to late 1990s the keyword meta tag was highly abused by many sites on the web by stuffing the keyword tag with popular but irrelevant terms in an effort to trick search engines into directing their way. Search engines started to address this problem in 1998 by looking to the actual content of the page rather than keyword meta tag for clues about a page’s relevance to a search term. Today, all of the major search engines have followed suit, making the keyword’s meta tag obsolete . You can safely omit it from your pages without worry of missing out on ranking benefits.
Other meta tags, like description, are still quite valuable. The description of a site shown on search results pages often comes directly from your meta description tag if it exists, so it is important o write this content effectively. When writing your description, keep it concise and attractive to visitors, avoiding hard-sell marketing speak. Speak to your visitors with respect and relevance to their needs rather than as a marketer making demands, and you’ll get better results. If appropriate for your site, consider using a more informal voice, as so many organizations use frumpy corporate-speak, and it can be the factor that distinguishes you from your competitors on the search results pages.
Long meta descriptions get truncated when displayed on search result pages, so try keep them between 150 and 200 characters long( maximum is 1024). Of course , including your keywords and phrases in your description is important, as they will be highlighted for the user in search results pages.
Using the lang attribute
If you manage a multilingual site, you may want to provide your meta description in more than one language using the lang attribute. Google can pull the appropriate description based on the user’s location, which is determined by their IP address, or when a specific language is defined in their their search preferences. Here’s how to deliver a multilingual description:
<meta name=”description” lang=”en-us” contents=”revival project:provide information.”/>
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