Are meta tags useful or not?

There's been some debate about the usefulness of meta tags among aficionados of search engine optimization (SEO). Some SEO consultants think you should drop them entirely and rely entirely on the page title, headings and body text to get good rankings in the search engines. And they're right — meta tags don't help much with the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. (They may or may not help with the smaller ones, but those aren't your primary SEO targets.)

(Note: to be exact, we're not actually talking about all meta tags, just the “description” and “keyword” forms of the standad <meta> tag as described in Section 7.4.4 of the HTML 4.0 specification.)

The problem that some people have with meta tags is that they worry that search engines give a “meta tag discount” to pages. This is because in the early days a common SEO technique was to stuff the meta tags with irrelevant keywords in the hopes of fooling the search engine into listing the page highly for results that really had little relevance to the page content. But many high-profile sites still use meta tags today. Look at any page on Amazon.com or the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These sites are authoritative and all rank highly in the search engines, despite their use of the tags. That's because they use the tags as they were designed to be used: to summarize and describe the text of the body. Even Yahoo! uses them on most of their pages, although Google does not.

But most people take the wrong view of meta tags. Used improperly, yes, they can cause search engines to discount your pages somewhat. So don't stuff keywords in them. But that rules applies to your body text, too — if you stuff keywords there (especially using hidden text) then expect a strong penalty.

What you should do is use the meta tags as a way to validate the content of your page for yourself. If you can't succinctly describe the page in one or two sentences, or come up with a short list of important keywords for the page, then how is a human viewing the page going to figure out whta the page is about? Nevermind the search engines, think about what the final visitor is going to see. No, they won't see the meta tags literally, but they will see what it is the meta tags are describing.

Look at the Invisible Fence Guide I'm building as an AdSense case study. In stage 1 I created my content without using any meta tags. In stage 2 I optimized the content and then added the meta tags based on what each page was about. The relative keyword densities of the pages didn't change after the meta tags were added. That's probably the key.

So use the meta tags as an excuse to think about your page content. It really is an SEO technique, just maybe not the one you think it is.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

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