The Truth About SEO And Meta Tags

In earlier days, when the Internet was still pretty new meta tags were everything. They were vital in helping search engines determine what the site was all about and how to rank the site in their search results. When the databases were smaller and more manageable, this meta tag provided a quick and easy way to figure out which keywords were important on a site. At that time, meta tags were king. Many SEO services could get web sites placed high because of the presence of meta tags.

As the Internet grew larger beyond all expectations, there was fierce competition in trying to get into the search engine's top ranking. SEO services who could not get their sites ranked through fair means resorted to unfair means. In an effort to bring traffic to their site they abused the system by incorporating useless and completely irrelevant keywords into their meta tags.

With the result that today, Google and most other major search engines pay little or no attention to meta tags. What is given more importance is the content within the pages of the site. A few engines still take notice the words within the meta tags, but they are used more as minor supplements to the actual content and title tag of the web page.

So, should you or shouldn't you use meta keyword tags anymore? It certainly couldn't hurt to use it. Search engines use many different factors to determine site rankings, so it makes good sense to use meta tags along with any other acceptable and legitimate technique that is available. At best, it increases your chances of getting a higher ranking and there's no downside to it unless you rampantly stuff your page with irrelevant keywords.

If you still intend using meta tags, first write your content based on relevant keywords and then create a title tag and meta description tag using the same keywords.