Meta Tags – Are They Still Important?

It is necessary to see first why this whole brouhaha about Meta tags exists. Why do some people think that Meta tags are as important as the Holy Word when it comes to SEO? Why do some people think they are needless frivolities that are best done without? Originally, Meta tags were supposed to be an aid for the search engine spiders to rank a particular page. Meta tags were included usually at the top of the HTML code (and still are) with a list of keywords that were targeted in the page. This helped the search engines know what the page was about and rank it.

But unscrupulous Internet marketers (read as Black Hat SEO gurus) began using Meta tags in the worst way possible. They began stuffing all possible keywords into the Meta tags in a bid to get their webpages ranked. You can fool all search engines some of the time, but you cannot fool all search engines all the time. This was evident when the search engines got wise to this trick of Black Hat bumblers and simply stopped using Meta tags for ranking purposes.

This is why people think whether Meta tags are still important to use or not. No one can really predict how search engines work. Also, different search engines work differently. Keeping this in mind, it is better to assume that Meta tags are still valuable. The very fact that websites and blogs allow you to put Meta tags and descriptions, means that search engines use them still. If they were as vestigial as most webmasters think, the busy Internet world would have done away with them long ago.

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The final verdict is, use Meta tags. Only don’t stuff it with keywords, because the search engines have grown wise to that. Use meaningful content and the right syntax for them and they will work wonders for you.