Last Updated on April 20, 2020
When I started to look into web design some years ago, one of the first things that I learned was that meta tags optimization is very important, if I wanted my sites to rank well in the search engines. Now I hear more and more that meta tags don’t matter that much, so we should not bother with them anymore, because the robots are not taking them into consideration anymore… Well, robots may not (although this can be argued on), but people do, for sure. Yes, this is correct: there are two meta tags whose content is seen by humans:
– Description tag: its content is displayed in the search results page, under the page title, so it is important that it makes people click to see your page. If you include your main keywords in the description, they will be displayed in bold when the search was done for those keywords.
– Title tag: everyday I see lots of search results having strange titles, such as an enumeration of words, or “main page”, or whatever other non-sense, not related to my search. I barely see a reason to click on such results, as they give the impression of a not very trusty source.
This is why I still use them, although I noticed that pages get indexed by search engines even without meta tags.
What do you think: are meta tags obsolete or not?
I used to think that they counted highly for SEO, but lately i’ve been hearing that they don’t count…I’m confused about it as well, so for the sake of loosing rank if I don’t have them I’ve decided to keep them in my web pages
Ryan, I think you are right. Maybe they are not so important anymore, but they don’t do any harm either, so why not using them? Actually I noticed that some of my pages ranked well for the desired keywords, without using the meta tags.
Yeah, in my new page I decided to put them in as I figured they couldn’t hurt.