SEO UPDATES

Meta Tags: Do They Matter?

Not a whole lot, it turns out.

Meta tags were originally intended to help search engines index web pages more accurately and to give people a little bit of control over their sites’ keywords, descriptions, etc.

Then they started being abused. Search engines recognized this abuse and made meta tags less important to search engine ranking. Now, many of the major search engines (like Google) simply ignore most meta tags.

Here’s a rundown on meta tag support from Search Engine Watch’s “How To Use HTML Meta Tags“:

• “Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.
• Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.
• Meta Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn’t worth the time to implement.
• Meta Everything Else: Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.”

So are they worth it?

Well, they won’t be what make or break your site ranking, but it can’t hurt to have them, just in case — especially for the benefit of smaller or country-specific search engines.

Just use them wisely: Your description tag should include a succinct blurb and a few keywords (but not too many: keyword-loading can be grounds for exclusion from certain search engines), and your keyword tag should include words that are relevant to your subject area (but don’t repeat them too often: that’s another search-engine no-no).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 30th, 2005 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Google News, SEO Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.