Are Meta Tags Important For PPC?

If you are doing any pay per click advertising you will need to give some thought to your meta tags. Your ads, of course, don’t need them, but you will use them for your landing pages. I’ve seen landing pages without meta tags, but I think landing pages with carefully crafted meta tags do much better.

The three meta tags you need to concern yourself with for your landing page content are:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

Don’t water down your landing page content with meta tags that aren’t helpful. Including a robots tag, author tag, copyright tag, etc. These tags don’t help the search engines at all and only give them more content to filter through to get to where they’re going. If copyright notices and author recognition are so important, put them on your landing page, but I’m guessing that not really important or you’d be doing that. Just take them out.

For your title tag, make sure it has your keyword in it somewhere near the beginning. But you also want it to be well-written. The title of your page will appear at the top of your reader’s browser when they land on your page. Also, it will be seen in the SERP for your organic listings so make sure you have a well-written and optimized title.

Your description tag will be the description that appears in your search engine listing. This is important, especially if your pay per click ad appears on the same page. If you have a well-written description then you increase your chances of getting the click-through.

Don’t add a laundry list of keywords to your keyword tag. If the keyword doesn’t appear in your content then don’t include it in this tag. Not only will that affect your organic listings, but it will also affect your quality score, which could cost you more money in clicks.

Meta tags are just one way of influencing your quality score. Don’t put undue emphasis on them, but don’t discount them either.