Meta tags carry with them a lot of debate over their usefulness in an SEO
campaign. Traditionally, however, they weren’t designed specifically as a method
to improve rankings with meta search engines. They are primarily, coding tags
that enable the website architect or website owner to relay certain attributes
and bits of information about a web page.

Meta Search Engines

Search engines realised that these tags contained a lot of useful information
that they could use in formulating their search result pages. As such, tags
like the keywords, title, and description tags became a major part of SEO.
In the early days of search, when the engines relied almost entirely on Meta
data to give them the necessary information, it was possible to get a site
ranked highly by doing little more than including the right information in
the right tags and then reinforce this information in the actual body content.

Early Search Results

Websites that employed the most important meta tags were, therefore, getting
a lot of exposure without necessarily including any relevant information. Soon,
the search engines changed the way they indexed pages and concentrated on factors
other than Meta tags.

Relevant SEO Meta Tags

However, there are still some tags that are relevant to an SEO campaign.

• The keyword tag has become less useful as a guide to what your page is
  about, and is now used as more of a warning for the search engines of sites
  that might be engaged in keyword spamming. Only include relevant keywords
  that actually appear on the page and don’t overdo it.

• The title and description meta tag are used when compiling search results
  to give potential visitors a brief snapshot of what your page contains. As
  such, these are vitally important tags that you need to include. Make them
  insightful and relevant, catchy and compelling. Include one or two of your
  primary keywords if possible but don’t simply list all of your keywords as
  a description.

There are many other meta tags that a site can deploy. Some give information
to search engine spiders and can even control the way a spider crawls a website.
Others impart information to the visitor’s browser on how a page should be
handled. However, tags alone will not boost your ranking.

Keywords are an integral part of SEO. Good keywords provide little in the way of competition but still provide adequate levels of traffic. They are also targeted to ensure that the resulting traffic is responsive and open to the message that you are portraying on your web pages. Poorly targeted keywords or overly generic ones can make it virtually impossible to rank highly and generate reasonable traffic.

1 - Regular Research

Keyword research should ideally be conducted on a regular basis. Popular keywords change on a regular basis and what may be popular today could be gone tomorrow. Similarly, you may find that entirely different keywords are those that you should be targeting in a month or two. By conducting new keyword research regularly, you will be able to find the most beneficial keywords.

2 – Use Semantically Related Keywords

Not every page needs to concentrate on a single keyword, especially not since search engines have introduced LSI. By combining several semantically related keywords into one page it is possible to reduce the number of pages on your site and offer more detailed content. Don’t get too carried away though. You will never manage to effectively optimise a page for too large a number of keywords.

3 – Use Targeted Keywords Rather Than Generic Ones

Generic keywords are more difficult to rank highly for than the more specific ones. They also generate less active traffic. Generally speaking, single word keywords are very difficult to rank highly for and most people when searching for a specific product or service (when they are more likely to want to part with their money) will use two or more words.