Use Of Meta Tags

09 Aug 11 11:50 pm

Some people say meta tags are no longer relevant in SEO while others say otherwise. I think meta tags are helpful and still relevant in SEO. Meta tags give search engines information about the website. A good article on various meta tags and their description is available at the Google Webmaster Help page.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!

20 Sep 11 2:25 am

Hi,

Some meta tags are still used, some were never used, some are used differently to how many assume they would be.

The description meta tag was written for humans. The description meta content will still be used as a snippet in most engines when the search words used to return this page in search results occur in the meta content. While The robots meta tag is use only when you want to exclude search engine from particular actions. And the refresh meta tag is for controlling redirection on sites where you don't have access to controling server-side redirection.

That's almost it for meta tags that have a direct use and value to SEO, except for using your meta content to correctly identify the character set and language used.

28 Sep 11 11:53 am

If there is a question at all whether "meta tags" are of value or not. Why not include them as the time necessary to put in the meta tags is minimal.

The "meta tag" value to the search engines may have been discounted along with the value of a page description however I commonly get my complete unaltered description accepted by Google and thus used word for word in the site's description. If that be the case, would not the meta tags also provide value for the websites?

I feel any information that could possibly affect on-page SEO is beneficial. The search engine's algorithms are a mystery as the search engines do not provide all the details as to exactly what they do or don't want a website to provide. I know of no data that indicates a website will be penalized for providing meta tags.

Margene