Do you use Meta Tags?

Hi all!

Opinions wanted on this hot summer day:
Do you use Meta Tags?

edit, clarification: by "meta tags" I mean tags for description and keywords especially.

 

I'd be surprised if anyone answers 'no'.

 

I only use the title tag and once and a while I will use decriptive tag. Never do I use KWD's tag except for some hobbie sites of mine.

D

 

i use it on two of my sites (those sites were new).
i dont use it on my personal blog.

 

are title tags meta tags? I consider meta tags to be the keywords, description tags, and I really dont use those.

 

i always use description and keyword tags...
not sure how much it helps, but i'm pretty sure it doesn't hurt? ;-)

 

I'm using meta keywords and description on all my sites!
Meta's still works for your rankings.

 

I use both keywords and description on all sites. dunno if it helps, but I'm so used to using them I never bother to check if it still has any value (it sure did in the ol'days)

 

Description has great marketing value. I see loads of snippets in the SERPs taken from the description so it's your free opportunity to lure the punter to your website.

 

the question that goes along with that is:
"Is it better to have a true snippet of your page or to have your meta description displayed?"

I'm not entirely sure, I guess as a surfer I'd be more likely to click a search result if a true snippet with the highlighted words that I search for being shown.

 

Half the time Google makes the snippet up from 3 or 4 small bits of sentences that don't actually read into a message. Construct your description with keywords and you have the benefit of both the bolded visual clues as well as a meaningful marketing schpiel. A call to action if you do it well.

 

Well I still Want some traffic from some of the small guys.

 

Some directories take keywords from the meta keywords tag. Google (mostly) uses your meta description as its "snippet". If you don't supply those tags, someone has to make them up for you or the searcher will find blank fields.

For the few moments it takes to construct them, I'd say it's worth it.

 

By the way, your poll is backward from the standard poll -- those 5 people who answered "No" thought they were answering "Yes".

That's how politicians do it when they need misleading poll results

 

Nah, if a politician wrote the poll, it'd lead to a certain answer, so the question would be:

Meta tags are undebatably the best way to get high rankings, so 90% of people use them. don't you?

... Yes
... no, I like low rankings

Then the newspaper would report it like, 75% of webmasters think that meta tags are the best way to get high rankings, 25% didn't read the question correctly.

 

Lorien's correct. I bow to his obviously greater knowledge of political spin-doctoring methods.

 

I use description Tags because of what I want my consumers to see for the SE description sometimes, but like Shawn I get to lazy to add keywords and the description most of the time.

I have found one website however that has 500 plus keywords in a tag on all their pages and surprisingly they do quite well in the SEs.

 

if you're right, does that mean that 5 answered yes while 15 answered "no"?

 

No, of course not

It means that 15 people answered "yes" and 5 people didn't read the poll choices carefully...