April 8th, 2010 by Nick

When search engines first began to crawl webpages, and long before search engine optimization became inherent to the function of the internet, meta tags where one of the prominent factors in determining a pages ranking – but is this still the case?

Well the short answer is “no” and with so many pages on the internet, and so many ways in which to optimize a page for search engines, the limited scope of met tags renders them practically useless in SEO – but is this the whole story?

Well actually, meta tags are not entirely useless and in an environment where even the slightest SEO advantage could grant you the hallowed top stop on a page of results, proper use of the meta tags might just mean SEO success!

The “Meta Keywords” Tag

Despite its name (or perhaps because of!) a meta keywords tag will have an extremely limited impact on the SEO capability of your site, and therefore you should avoid the temptation to pack this tag full of “keywords” as this could in fact garner a penalty from the search engine’s algorithms.

Despite this, as the meta keywords tag does provide you with the rare oppourtunity to include invisible keywords on your page (and which unlike “hidden text” will not be considered spam) you could possibly include some misspelling of keywords in the tag. However, whilst this might seem like a wily way to target some extra keywords, it is important to remember that both search engines and users don’t like misspellings, and therefore misspelt keywords are unlikely to lead anyone to your page anyway.

The “Meta Descriptions” Tag

If there is a way to turn the meta tags to your advantage, then it is undoubtedly by utilizing the meta descriptions tag. This is because, when searching your site, a search engine’s bots will look for a relevant excerpt by which to represent your page. If this is not found on your site then your page will be represented by the text in your meta descriptions tag. This simple fact could then have a dramatic impact on the existence of your website, as whatever you include in the meta descriptions tag might just come to define the “personality” of your page, when listed in the results set.

In terms of search engine optimisation the meta descriptions tag doesn’t have a direct effect, however, the indirect effect could be instrumental to your internet presence; i.e. if your sites description is packed full of relevant keywords, written in a clear and appealing way, it makes it more likely that a use will want to interact with your page, and potentially lead them to choose it over even higher ranking pages.

So – in conclusion, the meta tags will only have a subtle effect on your page ranking, however, considering that filling the meta tags is very simple, and that successful SEO requires the use of a diversity of techniques, however inconsequential, meta tags might just give you that all important SEO advantage.

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