Are Meta Tags Still Needed On My Website?

I read something the other day to say that yahoo are now using the bing search algorithms, which still use metadata to judge page relevancy. No real reason to leave them out just in case!

Until the day arrives that Google announces it will reject sites that include meta tags I can see no reason to stop adding them.

Absolutely leave them in! Why take em out? They are still being used, it's just no longer the only thing that's looked at.

Good question.

You should use meta tags for two things: the search engines, and humans.

First, filling out meta tags and page title tag, responsibly (no keyword spam!) shows the seo bots what your page or post is about. If your main keyword and secondary keyword are used in a responsible manner, you can't help but get a little extra seo lift, compared to the next guy (or gal) who doesn't take the time to fill out the meta tags and page title tag.

Secondly, and more importantly, Google and other search engines display search engine results for humans (that means me and you and your customers) from text they find on the website. And where do they get this text? From the page title tag and from the meta description tag.

Now remember, you cannot see the text in the meta description tag on your website....

Or can you?

Go to Google and type in a phrase and hit return. Now look at the results. Google displays search engine results from each website/page in four lines.

Line 1: Title of the Page (from the title tag)
Line 2 and 3: Page description (from the meta description tag)
Line 4: page url

Now look at the search engine results.

Some search engine results make sense. There is a common keyword phrase used in the <title> tag, meta description tag, and url, and the text used in the meta description tag makes you WANT to click on that link because that is what you are looking for!

Find a listing that makes sense and go to that website. Right click and view source. You can see at the top of the code how they filled out the meta tags.

Some results don't make sense. There is garbage, or something about contact information, phone numbers, etc... What is happening is that Google is trying to display text from that webpage. And it uses the first text it can find if the meta description tag is not present. Even if the text it doesn't make sense. (Or what some webmasters do is put the same lame text into meta description tags on every page....laziness!)

Click on a listing that doesn't make sense. Right click on the website page and view source. If the meta tags aren't either present, or they are empty.

So why not write meta description tags for both search engines AND for human users so you get the click when your site shows up in search engine results? Of course the answer is yes!

Personally, I fill out the title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag, and try to make sure I have my main keyword responsibly used throughout the page content, and the url.... and the result?

You can penetrate and dominate small lucrative niches and score at the top of the search engines AND get clicks from humans using search engine listings, because no one else takes time to do this. Or has the knowledge of what Google displays for search engine results and why.

But know you do.

Go and dominate your niches!

Mike D.