JENN

Meta Tags or no Meta Tags?

That is the question…

The common question out on the SEO circuit is Meta tags or no Meta tags. Some argue that meta tags are useless. But are they really useless? The answer is no. In fact, back in the golden days of SEO meta tags were the only way any website would have ever been seen. If you wanted your website to show up on MSN, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, or any other popular search engine at the time, if you didn't have the proper meta tags, then your website was virtually hidden from the world.

As search engines became the more popular way to find what you were looking for on the internet, and the internet itself began to grow into this immense “pot of knowledge”, and resources, search engines had to find a way to find all of those websites available on the internet and lump them in an organized easy to access source for users to find what they need. By typing in a word or phrase that describes what you were looking for, the more results you found, the more you would return to that search engine in order to find what you were looking for.

So, the search engines found a way to find websites, and pull the keywords from those websites if there were no meta tags available. The more a word or phrase was found within the content of a website, the higher a website would show up for that word or phrase. The more another site would have the same word, the higher that site would appear, and so on.

Along came Google, with their page ranking system which changed the direction of SEO completely. Search engine optimizers began focusing on getting links to their sites. So much so, that they forgot about the meta tags altogether. Some SEO individuals are so obessesed with the google page ranking system, and obtaining links to their sites that they get involved with links farms, and cross linking, which inevitably will get a website banned from Google or Yahoo.

So, what happened to the meta tags?

They are still there, and are as important as the day they were ever thought up.

In fact, Google and Yahoo both place emphasis on how important it is to have proper meta tags. Yahoo even lists out that proper meta tags are important when optimizing a website, and details how to create proper meta tags (click here to read more). Does this mean that your site won't be seen if you don't have meta tags? Not necessarily. But, your site will not show up for the words, or phrases, that you would like the people that search those phrases to find you. In fact, you will find that some phrases are so popular they are searched several hundred, if not several thousands of times a day.

So, by choosing the right keywords, and properly piecing them in your meta tags, and efficiently wording your description, you will find that not only will you show up ahead of your competition for the words that are getting searched, but that the one who searched that phrase might be lured to your link in the results more so than your competition because of your title, and meta tag description.