Meta tags, the little descriptions in your website code that look like this: are still an important SEO factor. They were ditched by the big G and Yahoo, deemed as useless in ranking terms. Now with the introduction of personalised searchs with Google the meta description is now a factor to be taken seriously again.

Although Meta descriptions are no longer part of the ranking algorithm a good description is a critical factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling and inviting the meta description is, the more likely searchers will click it. When users click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History. Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear higher up in their personalised search results.

Since everyone now gets personalised results whether logged into a Google account or not, the scope of the effect your Meta descriptions could have on your rankings can be significant. That’s another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimising your Meta descriptions.

The main thing is to keep the meta descriptions keyword rich but in a structure that will induce the prefered user response (a click).

I have been investigating a particular area of SEO which will increase your search engine listings and increase your pagerank, in some cases quite dramatically.

Whats the big secret I here you ask….well you’ll be disappointed….its TRAFFIC. Particularly traffic coming from Google will get you higher placement in Google and increased Pagerank. Get Google traffic and as a gift they will reward you with more Google traffic.

So how do we achieve this extra traffic through Google. Well using the usual SEO techniques is a great start but I also found that taking out an Adwords campaign for a website, increased its traffic and also improved my organic lsiting for the keywords I was bidding for in my Adwords campaign. I suppose some would call this an conflict of interest and maybe a bit dodgy of Google but if the Search algorithm works on equations that include how much traffic a website gets then this will obviously affect it.

Anyway I just thought I would share these observations and point out how important it is to optimise your website!