Meta-Tags Are Not Dead

Some years ago, there was a tremendous focus on meta-tags as a method of improving search engine rankings. Often it was the only method that webmasters used to improve their rankings. They could stuff all sorts of words into the "keywords" meta-tag to improve their search engine rankings for the words they wanted to rank well for. Often the keywords used were not related with the content on the page.

Soon the search engines caught on to this trick, and as a result the efficacy of meta-tags dwindled over time.

The search engines (especially) have devalued the SEO value of the meta-tag to a great extent, that doesn't mean that it isn't important.

When people search for keywords in your industry it isn't enough to be on the first page on the list of results. The searchers still have to be convinced, that the content on your page is what they are looking for! The way to do that is to write the most appealing page description that can possibly appear in the SERPs.

MSN uses the first 15 words of your Meta Description tag in the site description it displays on your SERPs and Yahoo uses the first 25-30 words. Google most often uses a paragraph of the content, but sometimes it presents the first 7-15 words of the Meta Description tag.

As long as some search engines still offer you some control over how your pages appear in their search results you should make the best use of it. If you don't put meta-tags in your code a lot of search engines will just guess at what to put in the description of your website.

Use the Free Meta Tag Generator to generate the code for your page and read the articels to learn more about this subject.