Are meta tags still useful?

[james438]

Are meta tags still useful? I am considering creating a more dynamic meta tag that is more page specific, but I am not sure if this is being phased out or has been replaced with something better. The last time I worked with meta data was, I suspect, 5 or 6 years ago when I started learning about web design.

[djr33]

<meta> tags are very general. In some cases they are useful. In others they aren't or are even frowned upon by search engines.

Some examples of general meta tags:
A meta refresh tag can make the page automatically reload (or go to a different page) after a certain number of seconds.
A meta tag can set the character encoding (or language).

But you are probably asking more about meta keyword tags that are intended to help search engines. That's a more complicated answer.
These certainly are still functional. And for some of the less advanced search engines they are very useful. For full-text search engines though they are either less useful or irrelevant. Google is an example of this. (I'm not sure if it actually entirely ignores the meta tags, but they certainly aren't important.)

Some search engines will rank your page lower if your keywords don't match your content. I'm not sure if any search engines actually rank your page lower just because you have keywords, if they are related to your content.

From this, it may be clear already that SEO is not uniform. Different search engines work differently, so your best approach will be one that uses whatever methods work for different search engines while not using any methods that are directly negative for others. I think having a few meta keywords might be helpful. But if you're only worried about the major search engines like Google it may not matter at all (and might actually rank you lower, but that's not a huge concern if you're not abusing the tags).

I read an article about SEO a while ago, and though most people are focused on Google and other big companies, there are also other markets out there. A major consideration is for countries other than the US. In the US, most internet searchers do use Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. But in other countries there may be some local search engines that are either equally or potentially more popular. I think it is in those situations where some of these search engines might not be so advanced that keywords might be very important.

Here's a basic rule: don't try to trick search engines. If you do, the smarter ones will decrease your rank. Aside from that, just have good content and use some of the standards for enhancing your rank, but again nothing that is dishonest-- Google at least may severely punish that. So for the example of meta tags, they should be fine (even helpful maybe) as long as they are accurate.

As for SEO in general, the web is moving toward a state where content is everything. If nothing else this is based on hits, so more people on your site means more people will find it on a search engine. In that sense, the web is certainly moving away from meta keyword tags, but they aren't entirely gone yet. I wouldn't waste a lot of time on them though.

[james438]

I think it might be better at this point to do away with the ones I have entirely then. Since they are located in an include file they are correct for a small fraction of the pages on my site. I suspect that the effort it would take in creating a dynamic meta description tag is just not worth it for the little good it would do.

[djr33]

Probably not, unless you specifically want to target search engines that are not advanced enough to use full text searches.

I didn't make a distinction above between keyword and description tags. A description tag actually might be a little more generalizable than keywords. Keywords that don't match a page (even if they match some other parts of the site) seem like they would be punished. But a description of the site throughout the site seems fair enough, unless the algorithms used to search for 'cheating' aren't advanced enough to tell.

But again, if you aren't targeting more primitive search engines, it probably won't help much, regardless.

[EvaBrown89]

Mets tags useful foe SEO
I suggest to add the following meta tag on all site pages to avoid Google pulling content from DMOZ or the Yahoo directory to populate the meta description it shows in the natural listings: <meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir">

[james438]

Thanks for the clarification djr33.