SEO Articles

Do we need Meta Tags at all?

For the past two or three years, many search engines such as Google and a few others have given less and less attention, and in some cases, no attention at all to Meta Tags. The sole reason for this is simply because in the past, in the go-go days of the Internet, ie: before 2000, many web site owners and webmasters stuffed their meta tags with useless information, basically spamming the search engines.

Defining Meta Tag

Meta Tags are snippets of HTML code concealed into the pages of a website that are used by the major search engines in an attempt to store certain data about that website.Such meta tags contain descriptions, keywords and key phrases, important site title information, etc.

While not technically mandatory, Meta Tags can, in certain cases, help the rankings of a given website, provided certain other essential rules of SEO are maintained. Once a new website is created and put online, search engine crawlers (spiders) will visit that site and try to index it in their database. Most major search engines operate differently and, by the same token, they each weigh different parameters of a web site according to their own (proprietary) algorithms.

Most major search engines have in excess of 125 individual elements and parameters they actually analyze when trying to rank and index any given website. Some of these important elements deal specifically with the way the pages were structured and also depend on other important factors such as keyword density, etc.

They will also take a note of websites that have omitted basic steps such as non-existent Meta Tags. For such search engines that have significantly decreased if not eliminated the importance of Meta Tags, there could be specific situations where the mere presence of Meta Tags could gain much more in importance.

In such cases where the engine visiting your site depends on that content, Nothing can beat good, targeted & relevant content, filled with keyword-rich text, it may be the only thing that will effectively work for your website.

The very best way to successfully use Meta Tags:

• To be really effective, Meta Tags should always be located in the HEAD area of an HTML document.


• Additionally, you should always make certain that your meta tags don't have any line breaks. Doing that would trip the search engines as they will probably see bad HTML code and could ignore them completely.


• Also, try not to use any capital letters in your code, as well as any repetition of words, phrases or terms within the keywords tag. Don't make the mistake many webmasters are still doing by "stuffing" meta tags, as it could seriously penalize or ban your website.

Effective Meta Tags

• The Meta Description tag is important as many major search engines will display this summary, along with the title of your specific page in their search results. This is usually what you see on the pages of search engines. It is recommended to keep this description reasonably short, concise and to the point. Also make certain that it's an appropriate reflection of that particular page's content.


• Keywords represent the important search words and terms that people will enter into a search engine's query box. You must choose only relevant keywords. If these keywords and key phrases are going to be written in your keywords tag, they must appear in the actual body content of that specific page.


• Almost everyday, we encounter commercial websites that have this tag written incorrectly. Remember that using the wrong syntax can actually result in the crawler coming to a bad conclusion and wrongly penalizing that page completely. On the other hand, if you really do not want a certain page to be indexed or followed, then you must substitute "noindex" and or "nofollow" into the tag. It is also strongly recommended to properly use the Robots.txt file exclusion protocol.

The Internet is constantly growing at a rate of approximately 7 to 8 Million new Web pages everyday. Google currently indexes in its database over 4.3 Billion pages. With most of the search engines indexing only a small fraction of that great number, meta tags can be used as an additional way to reasonably ensure a proper categorization for any given website.

If you always use terms that are really relevant in all Meta Tags, you are significantly increasing your chances at a better ranking in the engines. In the future, if they become more widely accepted and most major search engines increase their importance in them again, you will be happy you used them properly.

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