Should You Spend Time on Meta Tags?

anytime you do a Google search for any keyword or phrase what do you see well of course you see a listings page but that blue link at the top is a title the sentence below that is a description those are title tags hey everyone I'm Neil Patel and today I'm going to break down how much time you should spend on meta tags there's a few different meta tags out there the first is the title as I just described the second is a description which I also just described and the third one is a meta keywords tag a meta keywords tag is where you put keywords within there to tell Google and other search engines hey this is what this page is about rank it for this the meta keywords tag is useless do not use it reason being Google has said years and years ago that they ignore meta keywords tags and I've played around with this so much and other marketers in SEO have as well it does not help one bit with their search rankings now at the beginning anytime you create a web page it's not really going to rank and for that reason you shouldn't spend more than a few minutes to create your meta tags for that page and that's a few minutes in total for both the title tag and the meta description focus on making it appealing so that people want to quick through make it short roughly six seven words that's fine for your title tag your meta description roughly 120 to 140 characters sometimes it'll get cut off that's okay it's not a big deal especially when you're creating your meta tags at the beginning if you use the WordPress blog an easy way to do this is through the Yoast SEO plugin it gives you a box where you can easily type in a custom title tag and I met a description for each page now once the page is a bit more seasoned and it's been out there for six seven months you want to go into Google search console go look at the page any page that's getting traffic and see which pages are getting the most clicks for those pages you should spend way more time modifying the title tag and meta description I would say roughly five to ten minutes max and what you want to do with in Google search console it'll show you all the keywords that are driving traffic to that page that are integrating some of those phrases and words within the title tag and Meta Description by doing that you'll notice that your rankings will climb over time so when you're first releasing a page don't spend more than three minutes to create your meta tags once that page is over six months old and it's getting traffic you can spend anywhere from five to ten minutes once you become seasoned like me you'll find that you can do it roughly within a few seconds to a minute to create your title and Meta Description tag whether it's a brand new page or the page has existed for six months you'll get used to it and you'll get faster and faster over time