modern meta data tagging

[westwm]

would like to add meta tags to our small business website. for so many years its been operating without any. I read that in absence of tags, search engines simply use words from the body or content on the web page?

are these articles still relevant? this first one is from 2010

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: SEO Starter Guide updated

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Complete guide to meta tags in SEO | Search Engine Watch

are the above still relevant to teaching me how to use meta tags effectively on my website?

What role do EXIF or IPTC data play in search engine hits? Our company has hundreds of pictures of our products on the website and also being uploaded to social media (Facebook currently). Will tagging products in the correct EXIF IPTC field and uploading to the website or Facebook also end up as results in search engine queries? If so what specific EXIF IPTC fields should I be entering data in?

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Nancy OShea]

Keyword meta tags are virtually ignored by search engines.  Use them if it makes you feel better but don't count on any SEO juice from them.

A unique page title and an accurate but brief description of your page content is good to have because often that's the first impression people have of your site on web searches.   Other meta tags that Google recognizes:

Meta tags that Google understands - Search Console Help

To what extent Google and other SE's use image meta data is a complete mystery to me.    Maybe other folks here have more info to share.

[BenPleysier]

Adding to Nancy's reply and the excellent article that she refers to, it is most important to serve images that are optimised and that the "alt" attribute has a value.

Also worth noting is the speed aspect of the site especially for mobiles. For more see  https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Then there is content. I feel that the most important content should be placed as high as possible in your document. This means that the main content should precede the content of sidebars. Many sites have the sidebar nested to the right of the page for this reason. Using Flexbox and or CSS Grids you can still have the sidebar on the left hand side despite having the main content appear first in the document.

There is more, just Google the subject. One great tool is viewing the source code in a browser and you will see what search engines see.

[Paul-M · Accepted solution]

Keyword meta tag is obsolete, completely ignored by Google, there's some debate that BING may use it to identify spammy websites but there's no positive benefit at all.

A few key things:

TITLE tag  has SEO benefit  - on each page it needs to be concise, relevant and unique - keep under 60 chars. Try to drill down into your products/services pages so that you have pages with very specific subject matter, products, services etc.

META DESCRIPTION has small SEO benefit (debated) -  a well written meta description can increase CTR (click through rate) by drawing user clicks. Keep it under 160 chars.

H1 tag on page has SEO benefit - I would try to make this different to the TITLE tag if you can, again something concise.

You may also want to look at structure of page and h2 subheading as a minimum.

Make sure your content is unique, don't copy and paste articles from other websites and write your own product descriptions too, I see so many websites that just copy and paste the manufacturer product information, its much more effective to write your won unique descriptions for  products.

Make sure all your images have alt tags that describe them accurately,

Add new, unique content regularly (very important these days).

If you or third parties are sharing pages on social media then you may want to look at key tags for social media