Back in the mid to late 1990′s, the job of a web developer was hugely varied. The role would encompass not only the basic development of a site, but also its design, usability, marketing and SEO aspects.

SEO at this time consisted, basically, of the following:

1. Adding a Meta Description to the page header
2. Adding Meta Keywords to the page header
3. Submitting the site to Yahoo, or Alta Vista etc.

SEO soon became much more complex, some would say a ‘black art’, where simple things like adding Meta tags to your page would no longer suffice. It became a land of keyword optmised doorway pages, landing pages, keyword spamming, back linking and all sorts of other delights. Whilst, these areas still have a purpose, things seem to be getting better. You are encouraged, and indeed rewarded and for making your site validate to W3C standards, structuring the code sensibly, ensuring it is accessible, and adding site maps.

Rankings are detemined by a multitude of settings still, but changing even simple things now seem to have a relatively quick effect on Search engine results page positions.

Until 6 weeks ago, the site I run had been at number 1 on Google for our top keyword, for about 18 months. Through no changes on our part however, we were pipped to the number 1 spot by another company. Both sites are well designed and structured, and have good levels of keyword density. However, we have much greater traffic, and more back links, so we were unsure why we had lost our spot. After a convesation with an SEO expert, we decided to move our key phrase precisely 4 words nearer the front of the Meta Description tag, e.g.:

From:
<meta name="description" content="An article about the Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions tags - the forgotten friends of SEO" />

To:
<meta name="description" content="Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions tags - the forgotten friends of SEO" />

It seemed such an inconsequential change, too small to make a difference surely, how could it possibly make that much of a difference?

But it did, and back to number 1 we went.

Sometimes even the smallest changes can make a massive difference, so if you haven’t used them recently, pay a visit to your old friends the Meta tags, you may be surprised the effect they can have.