Meta Tags Still Useful For SEO

While meta tags once played a hugely significant role in Search Engine Optimization, the fact is, because of the overuse by some unscrupulous webmasters, they have, to a degree, been relegated to positions of far less importance over the past 15 years or so.

What Did They Do?

Some web creators would use one or several sneaky little tricks like loading up their sites with keywords that, being a meta-tag, could not be seen by their human visitors, but were visible to the search-engines.  Another method was to use the same color font for your keywords as the background image, so the wording was actually there, but human eyes simply couldn’t see them.  There are dozens of other methods they used.

Don’t Try To Fool The Search Engines

While it’s tempting to try and fool the search engines, you have to realize it’s also tempting to steal; that doesn’t mean you should do it!  Companies like Google, Yahoo and MSN have VERY clever technicians who spend all day EVERY day of their working lives making sure that their respective algorithms WORK; that means, that they find, index and present web-surfers will only RELEVANT content to their searches.

Some people STILL try to fool them, and actually end up being slapped on the wrist (sometimes referred to as a “Google Slap”).  The other search engines will also penalize you for doing this, by dropping your page rank or banning your sites completely.

The robots (spiders or crawlers) are more likely to use incoming links from related sites and the quality of your content than any sneaky SEO trick can provide.  With the increasing use of  LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), it’s becoming clear that ONLY good keywords, COMBINED with other words that might be used with the keywords will be accepted.

What Else Is Rated?

Technical precision is also of importance to the search-engines (clean HTML with no extraneous code), spelling (though some people deliberately try to rank for misspelled words), unbroken hyperlinks, not too much punctuation or use of asterisks etc.

The spiders/crawlers also look for time visitors spend within the site, how many times they return, number of page views, how current the site is (which is why blogs are so popular with search-engines), click-throughs and other similar non-technical issues.

Use Meta Tags In PPC

When using meta tags in your Pay Per Click (Adwords or similar) campaigns, try to use shorter and more descriptive words. It’s been shown that unless your keyword actually appears in your meta description, Google (and maybe the other engines) won’t use the description in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s).

So, even though it’s less likely to be able to manipulate the search-engines, the proper use of meta tags is still something you should be willing to spend some time on to get right.

Luke.