Google still uses meta tags in particular, the title and description tags. The title tag is the most important of all followed by the description.
Just keep using description and keyword tags. This is a good practice on SEO and I do think there are other search engines still use meta keyword tags.
title is one of the important factor in onpage. also description should be proper as it appears in SERP but is it true that google has stopped indexing keywords?
Google has not stopped indexing keywords. They just don't use the META keywords tag anymore. (Huge difference.)
hi dan, can you please tell along with meta tags keywords, description which other meta tags are beneficial for onpage? meta abstract in important?
Basically the only META tags you have to worry about are the character encoding and the description. Yahoo! may (or may not) use the keywords tag, but other than that, the only tag that goes inside the HEAD section you have to worry about is the TITLE tag.
Well if you really want to show up in google for your keywords and then have your site described simply as a bunch of those keywords that's up to you. Honestly, I think it would hurt your site more than it would help. The help would be minimal.
Exactly! The meta description is ignored by Google for ranking purposes just like the meta keywords is ignored by the ranking algorithm. The ONLY reason that meta description is important at Google is that they sometimes show it as the "snippet" below your title/above your URL in the SERPs. They will typically show the meta description if your URL does NOT have a DMOZ entry AND if all of the keywords from the user's search phrase exist in the meta description. Having a well constructed meta description that contains all of the words from your URL's <title> (since this "should" be the most common keywords used by users to find your pages if you've optimized correctly) can improve your CTR as Nigel stated.
As far as Google rankings, here's info right from the "horse's mouth", as they say: "Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?... A: In a word, no.... They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present.... Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking." Conclusions: (1) Google rankings are not affected by the keyword or the description meta tags. (2) They do "sometimes" use the description meta tag for the snippets shown below the hyperlink in Google search results. In my personal experience, my meta descriptions almost always show up in the SERPs. So I continue to take the time to write good meta descriptions. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
The meta description IS a meta tag. Do you mean meta keywords? The meta description tag does not influence rankings, but is still very useful in convincing people to click on your listing when it appears in Google. Google often uses the meta description tag as the snippet of text under your link, so having a polished meta description with a call to action can help to increase your traffic.
well all the answers gives a conclusion ........ that we all should use our main keywords in our descriptions because using those keywords as a meta tag will not bring any change in ur serps ....... any further quires ?
if google have stopped crawling your site for a reason...then first change that reason because i bet you know,,what such you did so Google suddenly stopped crawling.
Google has only stopped meta keyword, not meta title and meta keywords. Put your targeted keywords in meta title and description. But put meta keywords on your website because yahoo read meta keywords.
JHC... how many times do I have to say this? There is NO such thing as a META TITLE tag!! <title> is not a META tag. Only <meta> (or <meta /> if using XHTML) is a META tag.
Dan is absolutely correct. The only meta elements are those HTML/XHTML elements in the head of the form "<meta ... >" or "<meta ... />". <title> is a NOT an meta element. It is its own kind of HTML/XHTML element. Just because it exists in the <head> people seem to want to call it a meta tag or element. Peeps should really learn the difference between an HTML element (starting/opening tag + value + closing/ending tag... i.e. the whole thing), a tag (syntax used to open/start or close/end an element), and an attribute. The term tag is so often misused when people "should" be using element or attribute.
I think you can add a title to a meta tag like this though: <meta name="title" content="Title Of Your Page Here" /> No idea about the relevance of it's affect on Google though.
Google has certainly not stopped indexing meta description. In fact it's still an important factor in terms of SERPs. Meta keywords has no value as of now.