Recently, Google finally answered one of the more perplexing and debated questions in SEO: which meta tag is most important? The title tag? The keywords? The description? Do any of them even matter?  And, true to form, Google answered the question without saying anything.

Google has introduced “sitelinks” to its results pages. If a page shows up in the coveted number one position, it is now often rewarded with this search game-changer.  The reward: real estate, and lots of it.

Sitelinks are links under a website’s main Google listing. These links lead to subpages within a website. Currently, Google will display up to twelve of these sitelinks, giving a number one listing a vast amount of screen space.  Here’s an example:

Google has said that it is improving its algorithm to present the most relevant subpages in the sitelinks. For now, it looks fairly random.  And, not all browsers support sitelinks yet.

So, what’s the answer to the question, what is the most important meta tag? The sitelinks are speaking, yelling, even: ALL OF THEM.

A well-crafted meta tag strategy will help steer Google’s crawlers in the right direction. With proper title tags and meta keywords, you can tell Google to put this in the sitelinks, but not that, please.

The above example for Virtua is an example of a good meta tag strategy. Notice that relevant keywords are displayed boldly and notice, more importantly, that the mini-descriptions under the links are all different. Even though they have very little space to explain themselves, they get the job done.

Here’s an example of poor meta tag strategy:

Notice that the descriptions repeat themselves and that they aren’t very, well, descriptive. Note also the page titled “2.” I’m sure that’s not what I was looking for.

Because of SEO fads suggesting that meta tags are not as important as we thought they were, many webmasters allow computers to auto-populate their meta tags. This puts the same keywords and description on virtually every page. This will cause the descriptions in the sitelinks to be repetitive and stale.  Each page needs its own unique set of meta tags.

The number one position on Google is the holy grail of Internet searching. The battle does not end there, though. Not only do we have to fight for the top, but we have to look classy when we get there. You can show up early for a job interview, but if you didn’t iron your shirt, your chances of landing the job aren’t great.