Advantages and Disadvantages of Meta Tags: including ways to overcome the disadvantages

Meta tags are important because they impact how your site appears in the SERPs and how many people will be inclined to click through to your website. They will therefore impact your traffic and engagement rates, which can impact your SEO and rankings. Meta tags are an important part of a solid SEO strategy. Although some tags might not have a direct impact on rankings, they do impact how your site appears within the digital ecosystem. Additionally, they could be a factor in many non-traditional search results, like Knowledge Graph, Google image search, voice, and more. No brand should neglect them when developing content.(Brightedge, 2023) 

(ScriptEvolve, 2019)

Advantages:

Meta tags provide information about a web page to search engines and website visitors. They can be used to include information such as the page's description, keywords, and other metadata. Some advantages of using meta tags include:

• Improving search engine optimization (SEO) by including relevant keywords in the page's meta tags.

• Providing a summary of the page's content for search engine results and social media sharing.

• Specifying the character encoding for the page, which can improve its display in different web browsers.

• Indicating the author of the page, and the rights and copyright information.

• Helping social media platforms generate better previews when the page is shared.(Quora, 2023)

Disadvantages:

• Sometimes snippets are better at providing exactly what searchers are looking for than page summaries, especially if the page has a lot of content.

• Time spent working on meta description tags is time taken away from working on page content, which is more important.

• When you use it, you’re telling your competitors exactly what keywords you’re optimizing each page for. Competitors can take those lists that you carefully crafted and optimize their own sites for the same keywords.

• Time spent working on meta keyword tags is time taken away from optimizing your site for those keywords, which is more important.(WebHoating Talk)

How to use meta keywords and descriptions tags:

• Write a unique description or summary for each page.

• Make each description concise and accurate, with information that adds to the page title and tells searchers what they’ll find on the page.

• Use grammatically correct sentences and punctuation.

• Include keywords, but as in page content, work them in naturally.

• List the keywords and keyword phrases that you’re optimizing the page for in the meta keywords tag for that page.

• Include misspellings and alternative spellings of words on the web page.

• Limit your list to keywords that the page is optimized for along with the above variations; avoid keyword spamming.(WebHosting Talk)

Reference List:

Brightedge (2023) Are HTML Meta Tags Important. Available at: https://www.brightedge.com/glossary/are-meta-tags-important (Accessed: 17 January, 2023)

ScriptEvolve (2019) Advantages and disadvantages of Single Page Applications. Available at: https://www.scriptevolve.com/blog/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-single-page-applications/ (Accessed: February 2, 2023). 

Quora (2023) What are the advantages of a meta tag. Available at:  https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-advantages-of-a-meta-tag/answer/Lal-Media-Lab-LLP?ch=10&oid=1477743633085901&share=9677282b&target_type=answer (Accessed: 2 February, 2023)

WebHosting Talk (no date) Meta tags and search engine optimization - web hosting talk. Available at: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/blog/meta-tags-and-search-engine-optimization/ (Accessed: February 2, 2023).