Are Meta Tags Dead?
Meta tags are small pieces of information that are often included as part
of a web page. They are invisible to the user (unless they choose to view
the HTML code of the page), but visible to the search engines. Using
meta-tags to specify keywords or a description for a web page is not an HTML
standard convention nor requirement, but it is a widely accepted use of the
meta-tags.
There are many types of meta-tag, but from the search engines’
perspective, the most important ones are the Title tag (which contains the
page title), Keywords tag (contains keywords associated with the content of
the web page) and the Description tag (that provides a brief description of
the page).
In the beginning, search engines gave much weight to the Keyword and the
Description meta-tags, because they helped to determine a web page’s
relevancy related to a search query. There was a time when a “smart” use of
meta-tags could make the difference between a good and a poor positioning in
the search engines’ listings. However, those times are over…
The misuse of meta-tags was the main reason for which search engines do
not rely on them so heavily any more. Unscrupulous webmasters used meta-tags
to mislead the search engines in “believing” that a web page’s content was
related to a particular topic just to attract traffic. Indeed, nobody can
guarantee that the keywords entered are describing the content of a web
page, and one can easily use popular keywords (like “sex”, or “free pics”)
to artificially inflate the number of visitors.
However, being one of the few techniques capable of helping search
engines to “understand” human-produced content, meta-tags are still used by
many search engines. It is necessary to stress that no search engine relies
heavily on them any more, while some search engines ignore them completely.
In the past, meta-tag optimization was THE key-point in any search engine
optimization strategy. Nowadays, meta-tags still matter, but other factors
(like link popularity keyword density) are far more important.
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