Are MetaTags still important these days?

Title - yes, it's important for all search engines

Description - Not so important for Google search placement but it may be used to encourage clicks since it may be what's displayed in Google search results. Yahoo and MSN Live use it more but just how much is uncertain.

Keywords - Not too important except apparently for MSN Live. As long as they're reasonable in number you should have them since they won't hurt anything.

The Google Adsense bot will use these tags in determining the topic of your page so it's important to have them matching the content in order to optimize the ads your site gets served.

They're not important for google, but can still be helpful for MSN and Yahoo. Don't spend tons of time on them.

I made several quick Christmas affiliate sites. All I did was on-page SEO (meta tags, title tags & keywords on the page), nothing more. People found my sites the very first day I put them on the web & bought the products I was promoting. So I'd say "yes" they are still important.

that's great, Cynthia

Good on-page SEO includes content keywords - if you have great content, then you don't *need* to duplicate your efforts with meta tags. It's not going to hurt you, it's just not necessary

meta tags , you make me laugh ....... they are relevant but why dont you target google .. google is the ultimate if you can get indexed in google and eventually write longtail keyword rich article .the moment google starts ranking yahoo and msn will notice this and even rank you higher on there various serp.that just it

Yes, use them, use them all, don't leave home without them!!!

Jamie

If Metatags are not as important to google....what is then? I'm going to keep using them regardless...for now anyways, but if google is the big fish...what google bait works best?
I also see more websites using XML and a XML profile? What's that do? If anything....

Yes, meta-tags are still important. There are lots of other search engines aside from Google, that still pick up meta-tags so,if you want additional traffic from other small search engines, then definitely include the meta-tags.

Not that Metatags are "unimportant"...just asking if they are as important or useful as they use to be? I am hearing only certain parts, such as the title tag, description, etc are basically used. I read in some SEO Blogs that this is the case
re: Search Industry Blog - Do You Still Need Meta Tags? (No affiliation what so ever....just showing an example of SEO blogs that are stating this). On this blog, it states: [ Years ago, meta tags were the magic bullet for achieving high search engine rankings with organic search engine optimization. Today, most meta tags are not as powerful as they once were - except for the Title and Description Tags. ]

What i was getting at is Metatags use to be all the rage with search engine before...now focus seems to have shifted away (not totaly), but they do not carry the weight they once have.... What is the main focus of todays search engines then...if not the Metatag?

Another thing I am seeing are sites using XHTML instead of just HTML. What are the benefits...if any in using XHTML? Does XHTML work better in searches?

Why yes ofcourse Meta tags are still important but not on google search engine anymore.

Content is King.... But Meta Tags are still Important.

When I do a Page ranking of one of my sites. It has the name and then the contents of the Meta tag as the details of the ranking. Best that you control this by entering in the information that you want instead of the search engin putting the first X words from your page in that spot.

Title tags are important,Keywords are generally not important now a days,especially not the advanced alog's such as Google or Yahoo.
but they do play a role in other not so popular web search engines results tabs.
however The Title tag is Important.

Metatags are very important. They are still relevant on the search engines. With compelling meta tag titles you stand a better chance of being easily seen on the search engines.

It seems obvious to me that none of you really understand how to get the search engines such as google to give your pages good ranking. I say that because I don't see anyone talking about the things that really do work. Instead I see you talking about what was important yesteryear.

Yes, skillful use of meta tags are still important but only marginally so. One of the most important items in the SEO expert's arsenal is the site map. Site maps are text files that contain the links to all pages within a web site. It is ideally written in xml although a plain text file will do. The site map must be constantly updated as new pages are added to the site and submitted to Google through it's webmaster tools program. The site map needs to be referred to as a link rel statement on every web page.

The Urchin web site identifier is another important aid in showing Google that you are the author and owner of the web site. Learn about Google's Urchin program and how to use it. Nothing difficult about it whatever.

Make absolutely certain that there are no broken links anywhere on your web site. There are several free programs out there that will spider any web site and return a report showing all good links, check all outgoing links and return a report. XENU is an excellent program for that and it is free. Cure any errors it may report then save the good links to a text file and call it sitemap.txt then use a good converter to turn it into XML which can then be reported to directly to google who will instantly verify it's existance and that all the links are valid and working. If Google reports back that the site map has errors then fix those and resubmit.

Never delete a page from your web site. Not ever. If you do it will result in a broken link that will get you penalized. Enough broken links and you are in deep trouble with the engines. You have to think like they do. They went to your site and spidered it and gave you a listing based on what it found on your web site. When someone searched using a keyword or keyword phrase that fit your page the engine included it in it's serps and if it leads to a broken link the surfer is unhappy. Too many broken links and people will quit using that search engine and it will lose advertising revenue. Therefore broken links can get you banned from the engines and you might not know why.

Make sure that all your web pages contain links back and forth to other pages on your site. If you use a keyword or keyword optimized page then make more pages that while similiar in nature use peripheral keywords and keyword phrases and provide additional information.

You should get into social networking on a very large scale. Twitter, Delicious, Stumbleupon, facebook, twitturly, linkedln, friendfeed, and all the rest you can find. Get the Twitter tool bar and the stumbleupon tool bar so you can submit to those kinds of places as you surf. Then build landing pages on your website. A twitter page for instance, optimize them and use RSS to feed new content to them without ever having to visit them again. Be sure that you have links back to your index page and other important pages that you want the engines to find and to your site map for sure.

Use your blogs effectively. Write articles about your favorite subjects, not necessarily about what you are trying to sell or promote. Your blog should be hosted on your website and should be your index page. As you visit various forums and write posts such as this one then use that as content for your blog. It becomes new content for your blog and for your web page. Keep the archives which are also automatically posted to your web site along with your new content each day or each week or however often you post. Take that archive page and load it into Dreamweaver and save it as a new web page. Then use an optimization spider which picks out the key words and phrases, any links on the page and analyzes your meta tags. It will give you the keyword density for any web page. It will teach you how to write effective copy that will become spider food.

If your page contains words such as the, they, his, hers, him, it and other such words 25 times for each one (example) and your keywords are used only 5 times you obviously have a lot of rewriting to do in order to reduce the density of your irrelevant words and increase the density of relevant keywords. Soon you will learn how to write your articles correctly the first time and not have to rewrite or edit. Then when your article is well optimized link it to your other relevant pages, your index pages. and add it to your site map then submit the new site map to google.

Learn how to comment without spamming and then use trackbacks. And yes, learn how to use your meta tags. Your keywords are not what you think you want to be known for but should be derived from the keywords in the article. Your optimization spider will tell you what your description and keywords meta tags should consist of Never use more than about 140 characters in your description tag and never more than about 15 keywords and keyword phrases combined.

As an exercise I also scraped the entire web site of a well known marketer and it has exactly two pages on the entire site. I also validated the main page and it has 228 coding errors on it. How can you expect to get top billing in the search engines like that? How can you expect to get sales like that?