Google these days rank on the basis of relevance, popularity and recognition. It is therefore less to do with the Meta tag optimization, but this doesn’t mean you ignore them completely. Meta tags when used appropriately can still be useful in a number of areas other than just ranking pages.
Meta tags are extremely important as far as manipulating the user click-through SERPs is concerned. Since, Meta description is drawn often to structure the snippet that appears whenever your pages are listed in the natural search results. Thus, whatever the content these Meta tags contain in them plays a major role in your ability to attract visitors from the SERPs.
This tag is shown by search engines as a small text item or a paragraph in the search results. These act as webmaster’s chance to promote content to searchers and to let them know precisely whether the given page contains the information they’re looking for or no. Meta tags description helps describing any page content in a machine readable format, to make it convenient for the search engines. However, they can be spammed quiet easily. As a result, Meta tags optimization is not a critical part of now for Search engine optimization.
As I mentioned above Meta tags do not have any direct hand in shooting up the ranking but indirectly it can do much. Google not only shows your Meta description tag but by adding a better and more relevant content to it, more people tend to get tempted to click on the link. This in-turn gets you a better CTR (click through rate). And this CTR has a huge influence on your ranking in the search engine optimization.
How can you take maximum advantage of Meta tag
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The content or description in the Meta tags should be filled out appropriately
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Should be relevant and descriptive
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Each Meta tag on your website should be unique for each and every page and try to make them as attractive as possible.
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Naturally include target keyword phrases
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Meta tags should have content accurately describing the page
A broad imperative you should stick to for the character limits within each of your Meta tags:
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At-least 70 characters long page title
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Minimum 160 characters of Meta description
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Keywords phrases not increasing 10
Advantages
In a way, writing good Meta descriptions is crucial and should be taken as seriously as writing and article for the purpose of search engine optimization best practices. Though, it requires efforts and knowledge which can be gained over the period of time but the results of this hard-work would be rewarding and long lasting. Following would the rewards that you can expect.
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higher click-through rate
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increased natural search traffic to your website
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higher SERPs rankings
To take maximum advantage of a Meta description you should write it keeping in mind the humans as well as the search engines. If you Meta description does not contain the relevant keyword phrase that you are optimizing that page for, the chances are Google won’t show your Meta description.
With all above in mind now you know clearly where, when and how you should use a Meta tag and how it can benefit you. It might not directly help you rank high but somewhere can be of great help as far as in search engine optimization is concerned.