Using Meta Tags In SEO Revisted

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 20 of May , 2008 at 8:17 pm

Every now and then the topic of search engine optimization and meta tags rears its head for debate. Should you bother with them or simply ignore them?

The argument was picked up by SE Round Table quoting a legal judgment that declared META keywords as irrelevant and no longer used. To quote from the article:

a US court has decided that META keywords don’t matter — they are “immaterial.”

There are two issues to look at from this debate. First, whilst keyword meta tags may no longer be relevant in your search engine optimization program, will they hurt you if you do use them? From what I have seen and read, if you ensure that each page has its own keyword meta tag with only the keywords for that page, it wont hurt. Will it help? Consensus says no, they don’t help at all. In reality, until all the search engines publish their algorithms, we wont know.

My philosophy is fairly straightforward; meta keyword tags wont hurt so if you want to use them, go ahead - just be sure they match your search engine optimization program and keywords for that page. If you want to leave them out, that’s fine also.

The second issue that needs clarifying for some is the use of META tags. Keywords is only one tag. The two META tags that you should concern yourself about are the Title and Descriptions tags. Your search engine optimization program should ensure that each of these are optimized for each page, and for blogs, for each post.

Back in April we published a post on SEO Videos: Meta Tag SEO Tips that is well worth visiting and watching if you need any further advice on META tags.


Category: Meta Tags, SEO

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