I've built my new website and I think I'm ready to submit it to the search engines and start getting traffic. Do I need to add meta data like descriptions and keywords before I submit?
There are lots of ways to improve how your site is found on the search engines, often referred to as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and creating effective titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords go a long way towards this. However, it's not essential. You can submit your site without them.
If your using a specialist search engine submission service such as our own, we will check that at least your home page includes these and report back to you on any suggestions we might have to improve how your site is picked up. In particular, we would suggest it's important to have good titles for your pages.
Each page of your site should have a unique title that describes the content to be found on that page. If you can also include a meta description then all the better. It too should be unique to the page and describe in slightly more detail the information to be found on the page.
If you take time to prepare the titles and descriptions for your pages, your pages have a much better chance of appearing well in search results.