Why Meta tags are still very important

This is a very interesting article on why Meta tags (mainly the description tag) are still very important, as they provide the 'human touch' for search results.

http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/apr/7prt.html

This article motivated me to 'hack' my Wordpress template, and I posted that here:
http://www.justin-cook.com/wp/2006/04/07/hacking-wordpress-to-be-more-seo-friendly/

 

you know, this is a very good point. great article - how many times have you searched for something to see a listing that looks something like

Yourwebsite.com Main Page
"Home page | About Us | Our Products | Links | Contact Us"

just makes you want to click doesn't it? i know if this was the #1 SERP for my keyphrase, i'd be checking out #2. i doubt i'd click on the above example at all.

In fact, google picked up a joomla website i was working on a few months back before i had time to go in and mess with the metatags, and my google description read something like

"Joomla! The Free Website Management System!" or something like that. Once i noticed this, i went in and added a meta description tag, but unfortunately it took weeks for google to recrawl my site and grab my description.

VG

 

This may be my first posting on DP where someone has actually agreed with me!

 

So many posts say meta tags are dead and it bugs me.

The meta description tag allows you to write the snippet that google shows next to your search results. How can people ignore this amazing marketing opportunity?

Well done frank for bringing this up

 

I've always continued to use metatags ... since 1994 ... those who say meta-tags are useless are incorrect.

 

From my personal experience i overlook sites in Google search results that have a metadescriptiontag as i want a quote of text from the article i intend to read not the description of the site.

 

How could you ever know whether the snippet in the serps was from a meta tag or from the content of the page?

Google makes a decision to use the meta tag or the content depending on your search term. Sites can't control whether google uses the meta tag on an individual search basis.

 

exactly.

and besides, sometimes the excerpt is taken out of context, whereas the meta description is more precise

heck, take any google result for any page from hotscripts.com. It's excerpted from the page, it's completely and utterly useless