I recently had a reader ask me in the comments if I thought that Meta Tags were still relevant when optimizing a site. I considered a direct reply but figured a post stating my opinion on this would be a bit more helpful to others with the same query. This reader also referred to me as an expert in the field.
Now that I’ve managed to find the “deflate ego” button, I’ve mustered up the superman-like prowess of my abilities to put together a post on Meta Tags that will reawaken SEO agencies around the world and cause a revival to sweep through the internet!
Maybe not.
So the question being posed is “Are Meta Tags still important to SEO?”
They were the original way that we relayed to search engines what kind of content to expect on our websites, what they contained in summary, etc. Meta contained content for the author label, keywords, descriptions, doc type, copyright info and more. The tags are still around; people are just slipping away from using them.
A lot of people think they have gone the way of the dodo and bear little (if any) weight these days. Since the spammatazola of the online porn industry, where Meta content was aggressively abused on a massive scale, their importance carries a lot less weight with search engine algorithms now.
By no means does that translate to Meta Tags being useless. It’s quite the opposite. Yahoo and Bing still utilize Meta tags in their own algorithms to consider the rank of websites. They may not be the top player in the game like Google, but they are widely used search engines. Google places the bulk of its focus on the Title Tag when it comes to their algorithm and pushes the rest of the focus to the link profile of the site in question – calculating total back link load and the quality of those links.
Meta tags are not really a requirement, and it’s possible to rank very well without them thanks to the advancement of search engine algorithms. As a rule of thumb though, it always makes more sense to use them than to leave them out. It’s there, you should use it. Imagine if you had a large website with no Meta content and the algorithm for Google suddenly shifted. What then if they began utilizing Meta info for ranking websites again. That’s a lot of information to plug in that could cost you your listing. It takes months to build up a good rank in the search engines, and only days to drop off.
Bing also surfaced out of nowhere and is now a major player in search engine use. We know from the past performance of others *cough*Google*cough* that it’s easy for one company to unseat another quite rapidly. If the focus suddenly shifted to Yahoo or Bing (a stretch, but hypothetically speaking) you would again be scrambling to get your Meta content up to par.
They’re like the seatbelt in a car. It’s there, it serves a purpose, you should use it.
If you run without Meta Tags, the search engines can and will generate their own descriptions based on the content found within the first 200 words of your page. If that content isn’t optimized to meet keyword density it can negatively affect your page’s rank. When you optimize Meta Tags with your targeted keywords/key phrases then you have direct control over what’s being displayed by the search engines.
Or, I suppose you could bite your thumb at the search engines and throw the meta content out the window. I never was a fan of cutting off my nose to spite my face.
Meta Content alone contributes very little toward search engine optimization. By itself, it really won’t do a whole lot, especially if you’re targeting only Google results and you don’t care about Yahoo or Bing. I’m really not sure why people would shrug off other search engines but I’ve had discussions with people that actually take this route. I often have to fight back the urge to shake them violently and pose the question:
“Do you ever wonder what life would have been like if you hadn’t been deprived of oxygen at birth?”
It’s a piece of the SEO puzzle, and just one more building block that contributes to the overall optimization of a website. Sure, you could leave it out and it may not have much of an effect but it does have some effect. If you’re willing to remove one brick from the building, you’ll likely cut more corners. It eventually adds up, and soon enough you’re back to a pile of bricks next to you, and an unfinished piece of architecture that should probably resemble something beautiful except that it’s full of holes.
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Joerg Weishaupt is a 46 year old entrepreneur, software architect, search engine optimization and social media expert. Joerg has been building a lot of profitable Internet businesses since he put his first website online in 1995. He is also one of the founders and partners of Social Media Science LLC, where he launched a content syndication network called SYNND.
Joerg resides in a small, quiet community about 100 miles outside of Munich, Germany. If you ever seek to find him, look for where the cows gather.
