Meta Tags obsolete?

I'm sure that these days, these fields (ie Title Tags and Meta Tags - and even for that matter the Title Description) are not as "potent" as they used to be...but surely they must have some positive - and perhaps major - part to play in the SEO strategy of any website. I am just asking as it seems that more and more references are made to the fact that these fields are becoming less and less effective in the current climate of Web2.0 and ongoing developments. Any comments or experiences with this?

 

People who say such things don't know what they are talking about. You could argue that the keyword tag doesn't have much effect anymore though.

 

title is very important. description is somewhat important as well. keyword tags are worthless

 

I find that the TITLE tag IS important for your SERPS ranking.

I find that the DESCRIPTION tag is best used to optimise clickthru from the SERPS listing. No point stuffing it with keywords - use it to entice the viewer to clicking on YOUR link and not your COMPETITORS link.

I don't find any use with the keywords tag however I still use it "just in case".

My 2 cents

 

I work with SEO and I consider myself quite successful, are you trying to suggest that keywords are worthless, therefore you don't add them?

IMO keywords are worthless, they can be an indicator to the SE's that a site is spam etc, IMO they are worth adding.

 

Meta description is still used by search engines to show in result text.

 

Title and description are very important. Keyword tags are ignore by most of the search engines. Description tag explains to your visitors about your link.

 

Also note that <title></title> are NOT META tags. The only META tag there is looks like this: <meta> (and has a bunch of attributes with values inside of it (or <meta /> if you're using XHTML syntax).

 

Back in the early days of search engines meta tags were often the most important and sometimes the only tool you needed to ranking highly for keyword phrases. This made it very easy for sites to rank highly for terms that had nothing to do with the actual content of the site thus making the search engine results pages full of sites that were not relevant to the user.
But now, it is only a thing of the past.

 

The title IS important but it is indeed not a meta tag.

I'm pretty sure meta tags aren't really worth very much any more, but I still include at least a keyword and description tag because I figure if it doesn't REALLY help (which I suspect it doesn't, at least not very much) then is can't possibly hurt.