Are Meta Tags still important?

Can someone, please, clear me one thing? I have heard that Meta Tags are not that important regarding SEO as they used to be, cause people did abuse the system and Google crawlers do not pay that many attention to the Meta Tags they come across. Does anyone have more info regarding this? Is it true?
Thanks

 

Hello, Recently I have gone through many of the SEO related articles and I found that Yes, Meta tags do have an impact on search ranking. Meta tags are often called "categories" on the blog's tools like word-press. As google bot scrawl the pages depending upon the keywords in the query the reader is searching for. which means its all depends upon the valid keywords. So while defining the meta tags for your site "Use the right words" The keywords may not matter for search engines, but they do matter for users. There are proper guidelines (available online) while defining the meta tags just to have good results in SEO. Hope you find it worth reading. Thanks!

 

@Mohseena Siddiqui I know how the whole mechanism of meta tags work. I just wanted to know if it is true or not that they don't matter any more. Thanks for the answer
I found this article, where it says that Meta Tags aren't needed anymore https://codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress take a look.

 

Only the search engines know for sure. But my opinion is that metatags are useful and that you should definitely use them. Look at it this way: any information you give can be used as a signal to help the search engine algo.

As a database developer and often wondering how I would build a search engine. Yes, I would use metatags. This thing about the keyword metatag not being used started more than ten years ago I believe. And I bought into it myself. As a result, less than half of sites use them. But I believe they can be extremely helpful so I suggest using them and using them properly which many of those who do use this metatag don't.

The description metatag may not have much weight to rank the page. But its value is more to provide additional information to the searcher and make them click on your listing. That is important. Strangely, a large percentage of sites don't use this metatag, probably because of this myth that metatags are not used nor important. I think those sites are doing themselves a disservice.

There are many other metatags. Thousands in fact. The vast majority are customized for certain things such as the google-site-verification metatag. Social media sites like Twitter have a bunch; I found well over 100 just for Twitter. Not something that will help rank your site but useful in other ways.

Some others could help you rank better (or worse) in some circumstances. The language or location metatags for instance. A datecreated metatag could help but also - in time - hinder. The search engine is more likely show more recent pages rather than older ones. I still think it should be used since that could be good information for a visitor.

 

@Lucid Web Marketing Thanks for such a detailed answer. You convinced me to give Meta Tags a try

 

I liked this statement and fully agree with you. As far as I can see Google still uses the title meta in this search results.
You may need to consider the og meta properties used by Facebook when people are sharing your contents.

 

Any recommendations on what is the best WordPress plugin for Meta Tags out there?

 

i guess you already know Yoast SEO, anyway this is one of the best complete WordPress SEO plugin that i worked with. it's a great plugin for improving your WordPress SEO, optimize your contents and meta tags too, like og tags for social media and..

 

@paminos yeah, I am using it already, I just thought I have to get something additional for Meta tags, but if Yoast can do it all it great, I'm new to all of this so I tend to be lost over things from time to time thanks for advise

 

<title> is not a metatag. You should of course have a title for each and every page. It has a lot of weight in ranking.

Metatag declarations are a part of the HTML standard. You can create any metatag you wish and that's what has happened. I mentioned the Twitter tags. The description and keywords tags were something that early webmasters created. The first search engines simply picked up on these for their purposes and once that happened, it became something of a de facto standard. I don't believe it was never part of HTML itself to have something call a description metatag nor any other tags.

Here's a list of metatags that Google recognizes. That list is not extensive. You'll note that keywords is not there. But doesn't mean they don't use it for some things, including ranking. I suspect the keyword metatag is used for Adsense pages.

 

@Lucid Web Marketing Thanks a lot

 

these are same like your body's bagboon

as you will see many mouth
you will see many replies

 

Meta Tags are not directly affecting the page ranking. But it still important for SEO because when the page shows in SERPs this description shows the information of your page.

 

@Saurabh Thakur Thanks. Well since everyone here said it's important I sorted out all my meta tags, meta descriptions etc.

 

When people say meta tags are no longer important they're specifically referring to Meta Keywords. In the old days, webmasters used to stuff keywords in the tag and it was incredibly spammy and so Google stopped looking at them to determine the content of the page. You should still worry about the Title Tag and Meta Description.

 

@dcristo Accurate as always, mister Thanks

 

hello Jiewux

Meta Tags have been one of the most basic elements of SEO. It is a must to know for every SEO practitioner.Google opted meta tags out of the ranking factors. But that doesn’t mean they’re not important anymore. Meta tags still play quite a big role in your site’s SEO.

The importance of meta tags is that the search engines read them in order to compare if these keywords and the description are related with the visible content. your meta description should be related with your content and your site’s niche.

thank u

 

Hey!

Meta tags are still very important. People abuse keyword meta tag and hence it's not any more important.
Don't use keyword meta. You should still pay attention to description and other stuff. You can install yoast SEO and it will tell what you should do. On every post it will show the important stuff that you must fill for ranking well.

 

Hello,
I completely agree that meta tags are still important.Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page's content; the meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but only in the page's code. And meta tags are having little content description that help to tell search engines what a web page is about.And it will effect your ranking also.