Do you still pay attention to the Meta Description and Alt Tags of your articles?

One of my rules in my content writing service is to proactively place a Meta Description and at least 5 Alt Tags above the title of the articles that we write. I know that those two are important when you have the SEO Yoast or any SEO-related WordPress plugin on your website.

On the other hand, I've noticed that 99.99% of my clients don't proactively require me to write a meta description or include some tags in the MS Word file. I wonder if people really put a high regard on having a well-written meta description and some tags. If these were really important to you, you would deliberately require or mention the need for those two when you place an order. Do I make sense to you?

I might remove the Meta Description and Alt Tags labels if these two don't help at all on your content marketing strategy.

What are your thoughts about this?

 

I don't know about others, but I use them.
I have seen those descriptions on Google
I used few articles for my Micro Niche Site (Custom coded in PHP) and used alt tags and descriptions.
Just with proper On page stuff, my site is ranking on Page 3.

 

Hi, @soccerlover. Meta descriptions really appear on Google as parts of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). When we search something on Google, the SERP has 3 parts: the title, URL, and the meta description.

 

Yes, it does appear.

 

The Meta description, while holding some weight in terms of SEO, is more important to craft for encouraging clicks. For example, I never head to a SERP link based on it's title or url, but most of the time because of the meta description offering an insight into the content

 

The meta description is the gist or summary of the whole article.

 

Meta description should be super enticing as to encourage click throughs. People who are smart may even model them after adwords ads in their niche as these are paying per click.

You want to write something appealing to encourage the visitor to want to click to your site. Meta description is super important imo. Not for rankings but click throughs. I just lol at people with crappy descriptions and broken english.

You can encourage someone to actually visit your site with a good description. What's the point of ranking if you have a shit description and people don't even want to see what's on your site because your

description was pure garbage?

 

I pay attention to the meta description for sure. It appears on Google and the other search engines!

 

Dread to think how many times I've seen meta descriptions stuffed with keywords.
' Viagra, buy Viagra here. Best Viagra prices. Viagra on sale here, me love you long time if you use Viagra'

 

I totally agree with you, @freckletone. It's good to know, through the BHW members' comments on my thread, that some are still paying attention on their articles' meta descriptions. In that case, I'll tell my team to continue writing Meta Descriptions and Alt Tags for our clients' articles.

Haha. Some "SEO experts" try to play with the algorithms of search engines. These days, some people still think that long-term results are achieved by plastering keywords here and more keywords there.

 

If you guys wonder about Meta Desc, I just saw this useful article :
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/create-best-meta-description-2/175017/

 

Has BHW integrated with Digital Point?

 

Not that I know. What made you ask, @RedMango?

 

Meta descriptions won't have a direct impact on your rankings, but use them to encourage clicks. Don't even bother spamming them full of crap keywords and LSI keywords.

Always bother with alt tags on your images, but I wouldn't bother trying to fit your keywords into the tags, just describe what the image is. Alt tags are used for accessibility - it's not worth trying to game this.

 

Hi, @MoshaD. Thank you for your input. Would you mind expounding a bit on what you mean by "Alt tags are used for accessibility"?

 

it's used for disabled people

 

Hi, @TayaX. I believe I'm not aware of that. How do Alt Tags help differently-abled people?

 

Image alt tags are used for screen readers and accessibility tools, primarily used by less able people, or people with vision difficulties. Search engines obviously use these tags to better determine what the images actually are too. So unless your keyword naturally occurs in your image description, I'd typically try not to stuff them with keywords.

 

Thank you for shedding some light on that matter, @MoshaD.

 

Encouraging clicks directly affects your SEO. If you are serious about your SEO you should be creating good meta descriptions.