Are meta tags important?

Are Meta tags a thing of the past?

Many SEO experts will look you in the eye and explain patiently that meta tags are no longer of any use, and go on to say that search engines no longer use them.  So if meta tags are no longer used, why haven’t the tags been discontinued? Or maybe they are only used by the file server, and not for indexing by spiders.  Or maybe those so-called SEO experts haven’t got it quite right.

The idea that search engines do not use meta tags is sort of an urban legend.  The kernel of truth that this grew out of is the fact that search engines no longer give a site preferred ranking by SPAM-like use of keywords in the meta tags.  In fact, a site which abuses the keywords in their meta tags is very likely to be penalized by search engines.  But only a few years ago, you could get a top search result by using the keywords repeatedly in the meta tags.

Do you want to verify for yourself that search engines use meta tags?  Type a keyword phrase into the Google search  bar.  When the results are displayed, read the site description that is given for the number one search result.  We now have two of the major meta tags enacted, the “definitions” and the “description” tags, and we will see in plain text that both are used.

Click on the top search result.  When the page loads, click on the “View” option of your browser menu bar, and select “View Page Source”, usually found towards the bottom of the drop-down menu list.  A new window will open in most browsers, that contains the exact code used for the web page being viewed.

Note that near the top of that web page, there are at least 2 meta tags, one for the “description”, and another for “keywords”.  The description will be a match of the description shown in the search engine search results.  If the listed description was too long or too short, the search engine may have cropped it, or continued with text from the page content.  Likewise, if no description is listed, the search engine will grab the first block of text from a web page to display as a description.

But the “keywords” will contain at least the phrase you entered, and possibly other key phrases as well.  This particular meta tag is used in several ways.. it offers a quick index of the important points f the page, tells search engines how you want the page to be identified, and confirm the site is relevant by using keywords that relate to the actual content.  By adjusting and manipulating the keywords used for a site over time, you can observe how those phrases affect the placement of the site, and even have an effect on logical but non-literal matches for which your site scores.  But remember this test, and when someone tells you the meta tags are not important, maybe they’ll be a competitor.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com