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Unlearn What You Learned: Meta Tags Are Still Useful Today

// July 15th, 2010 // SEO tips, Web Content Writing

If you’re serious in search engine optimization (SEO), it’s old news to you that writing meta tags is almost a waste of time nowadays because Google and other major search engines no longer give them a sacred place in their algorithms.

But if you’re more serious about SEO, you would do better than to ignore meta tags altogether. While you no longer have to fuss over the number of meta keywords to use, a good set of meta data on each of your Web pages will still help you climb search engine results pages (SERPs) and assure your website’s future.

Let’s see how.

Meta Tags: How they Became Unimportant

It used to be that meta tags were the ultimate weapons of websites against each other. There are three primary meta tags: the title tag, meta description tag, and the meta keywords tag. Since search engine spiders used to hungrily crawl meta data to determine relevancy to a query, people exploited the system and resorted to “keyword stuffing” – a term that originally referred to the practice of putting huge numbers of keywords into the meta tags, especially the meta keyword tag. In fact, this particular tag used to support more than 700 characters and search engines indexed up to a thousand characters to determine a web page’s relevance.

Soon, many webmasters were just resorting to keyword stuffing by putting useless information on the actual webpage and copy-pasting all the keywords they can find to the meta tags to dupe search engines into thinking their websites hold useful information, when in fact, they didn’t. Search engines led by Google soon put a stop to the crooked practice by implementing an algorithm that didn’t need meta tags to determine relevance.

Why You Should Still Use Meta Tags

While many resources on the Internet today will tell you to forget about other meta tags except for the title tag and the meta description tag (because they are the only ones still partially used by Google), the wiser thing to do is still to spend some time putting in a good set of meta data on your webpages. Here’s why:

Google is not the only search engine out there. Yes, Google is the lord of the search business, but there are billions of search queries out there that don’t come in through Google. Many minor search engines still use meta data, including the meta keywords tag, to determine a webpage’s relevance to a query, so fill up your meta tags to make sure all other search engines are covered. Instead of copy-pasting a thousand keywords on the keywords meta tag though, you can reduce the number to around 200 to 250 words to serve these search engines.

Google still uses the meta description tag. While Google doesn’t rely on the meta description tag for descriptions on its SERPs, snippets of the meta description tag still show on many of the links that come up. Even if Google’s equation doesn’t give weight to the meta description, people still read these descriptions when they appear on the results pages. Thus, the meta description tag improves your click-through rates, and you will convince more people to visit your site if you write clear meta descriptions for your webpages. Leaving this tag blank could signal search engines that the webpage is of a lower quality than others.

Google still uses the title tag. Think about your title tag very carefully because Google still uses this tag to link to your webpage. Most Web browsers also use the title tag on their reverse bars and “Favorites” tool. Therefore, it’s still best to put keywords on the title tag to direct more traffic to your website.

The meta keywords tag can still be used for internal search. Aside from this, there are some types of CMS software that utilize meta keywords for cross linking and tagging. Finally, you can also put synonyms on your keywords that didn’t actually appear on the webpage’s main text. Never put unrelated keywords on the tag though because some search engines might recognize this as keyword stuffing and drive you to the bottom of results pages. For the most part, you don’t have to worry about Google in this respect because it doesn’t read the keywords meta tag at all.

Anticipate future modifications in Google. Google is continuously improving its formula and if they change back to giving more significance to meta data, your website will be buried under a heap just because you’re too lazy to add them and you did what others told you to do. It takes very little time to add these tags. If you can spend countless numbers of hours designing, programming and uploading content on your website, surely, you can set aside a few minutes to write or copy-paste a few sentences, keyword terms and phrases. You never know what Google’s going to do next, so it’s better to make your website as flexible as possible.

For all these reasons, it’s clear that it is still very important to put meta tags on your webpages. Remember: just because everybody says you should drop “tradition,” means you should jump on the bandwagon. Always think ahead of others to lead this very wild and unpredictable SEO race.

Unlearn What You Learned: Meta Tags Are Still Useful Today
by Marvin Sanchez, 2010