Are Meta Tags Necessary?
*This is a question a lot of people ask and a lot of the older school SEO guys still push Meta Tags pretty hard. In today’s world, as mentioned below, good, high quality content… is king.*
A good question to ask is if meta tags are still necessary. They used to be more helpful, providing important information to the Internet browser. As browsers became more sophisticated, they stopped needing a lot of hand holding in order to figure out if your site is in English or Chinese.
Google no longer uses the meta keyword in search result ranking and they confirm this in their Webmaster Central Blog. Some search engines don’t use the meta tag information any more because many people abused it. In fact, meta tags may not represent the content of your site, but, it still doesn’t hurt your status with search engines if you make use of these little bits of information, and do so truthfully. Furthermore, Google does still use the meta description tag in some situations as part of the snippet of your site displayed in search results.
Without a doubt, content is the biggest contributor to search engine page ranking, so if you want to raise your rankings, make sure you have quality content.
Covering all the reasons meta tags are and aren’t important to search engines is beyond the scope of this article. In the Resource section below are some links to more information on meta tags and their impact on search engines.