What are meta tags you ask?
It is kind of hard to start out without a brief description of what meta tags are. You have probably heard about the importance of the ‘keyword’, but what does that mean? The meta tag is a way to place site relevant information on a web page without it distracting the visitor, and making sure a passing search engine will find the content, hopefully adding you to that particular search engine’s list of search results. So, in short, meta tags are part of a web page’s code that is only meant for search engines.

Why do you care?
In the past it was thought that meta tags, or meta data was the way to get ranked higher on a search result at you favorite search engine. If you had site relevant information in your meta tags, you should place higher on a search than a site that did not use meta tags, or a site that had tags that were not related to that site’s content. But then the abuse started, sites placing keywords in the meta tags that not only were not related to the site’s content, but since the tags were commonly searched on the search engines, these sites started ranking higher just for this fact. So if you did a search for “ice cream” you were given a result of an adult-orientated site. Obliviously not related to your search, but since the web designers knew how to manipulate the primitive search engines, you were stuck with the fact that you had to manually search you search results. This defeated the entire logic of searching, since it still led the searcher to do most of the work.

So what happened?
In late 2002, most search engines released information that they had stopped supporting the keyword meta tag for input for search relevant content. “In the past we have indexed the meta keywords tag but have found that the high incidence of keyword repetition and spam made it an unreliable indication of site content and quality. We do continue to look at this issue, and may re-include them if the perceived quality improves over time,” said Jon Glick, AltaVista’s director of internet search. Many search engines followed Alta Vista, but not all.

So now what do I do?
Since the ‘keyword” meta tag is not really supported by any major search engines, what does this mean to the design and optimization of you web page? There are other meta tags available to use and that are supported by search engines, such as the ‘title’ tag, the ‘robots’ tag, and the ‘description’ tag, not to mention some others. Having other tags in your page is helpful for the search engines, it just may not help you placement in their rankings. Spending time developing the title and description tags on you pages so that your page content is clear and informative is much more important. When the search engine indexes your site, the information in the title and description will be benificial to the searcher, and in turn, be beneficial to you.

In conclusion…
Since there is no real way to guarantee search engine ranking placement, and since meta tags aren’t the “secret ingredient” to maximize those rankings, what have we learned? Meta tags are useful for delivering data to search engines that is relevant to the content of a page. Meta tags will help with the display of your content in a search, just not the actual ranking position. There are alot of things to consider to optimize your web page, but spending endless time creating meta tags, especially keywords, is no longer worth it. The focus of content on the page is much more important, and there are other ways to optimize your site, but that is a whole other article, or few.