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To meta, or not to meta - that has often been the question, with conflicting responses as to whether or not it is just a waste of time. The answer to this question seems to be resoundingly affirmative as making efficient use of these tags and description text is actually beneficial.

It does makes a lot of sense - meta tags are at the very top of a page, the very first relevant text that crawlers read. Of course meta tags and description matter, the location being prime attention-getting real estate with the way today's search engines and web crawlers work. Page ranking is not increased; however, clicks are increased, which in turn can increase both conversions and traffic, the latter of which can increase rank. Displaying the right text in the meta tags is important in order to gain such benefits.

Explanation

In the header of every internet page, and just after the "head" tag, there is usually a section of meta tags that can be customized to suit each individual site. There should be a tag that says "meta name" which has a few listing options, such as description, keywords, authors, or anything else to be used as a search filter for the web page. Description and keywords are the two things most important to indexing SEO and to help find a page on social networking sites. The tags can easily be added if not present.

Function

When someone does a key word or phrase search, there are different ways that the browsers sort, including how a page is indexed with keywords, backlinks, hits, etc. Indexing works by finding and remembering common keywords. If there are keywords and phrases in the "head" section of a site, they are indexed more quickly than the rest of a page, enabling browsers to file a page faster. When a site is indexed faster, there is a better chance for more traffic, which increases rank when calculated along with other SEO techniques.

When a website shows up in search results, the description text is visible to give a one sentence or 159 character explanation of the page. The benefit is that viewers can find a site faster without having to click on unnecessary pages that don't provide the searched for information. With a good description, readers will know right away if a page is the right one and hopefully will click to that site.

Free Advertising

Another perfect example of the benefit of a good description can be seen in any random browser search; some pages come up with an informative explanation of what a visitor can expect to see while others come up with a long URL. With nothing else added, most browsers just use the website URL as the description, which does nothing to actually entice someone to visit the site. If anything, it drives visitors to another link that uses meta tags and has a good written representation. This text can also be promotional in nature and works well as free search engine advertising, something advantageous to any website.

Meta tags and meta descriptions are a very simple idea that is often overlooked. Past controversy over functionality has tended to diminish their usage, which is unfortunate because the truth is - they help. Meta description and meta keyword tags create faster indexing, are more interesting in search results, and allow a web page to more easily show up in the search engines on the bigger social sites such as Facebook and Google+ among others. Whatever their purpose may be, it provides yet one more free way for a website to be noticed - which is the whole point of an internet presence in the first place!

Chris Hunter is an expert in Web Design and Search Engine Marketing. To find out more about Austin TX SEO, go to the main website at: http://www.webunlimited.com/.