I am in little confusion about using Meta tags because as I know meta tags are devalued and not valuable for search engines as earlier and do not help to get higher ranking on search engines or Page rank so still we should use meta tags or now we should leave it. Does it all right to add meta tags and leave your keywords open among your competitors. I mean by using keyword tag we add our all main keywords to our keyword tag and your competitors can easily see your keywords through view source and your hard work in selecting right keywords will be waste and your competitors have better chance to rank well and also have great chance to beat you without doing enough hard work. What should we do, use it or avoid Meta tags now?
I see a lot of threads these days about Meta-Tags ofcourse they are important and you should never ignore this...
It's one thing that has been discussed a number of times and I guess every time it comes down to this. Use it or not, it's your choice. Some of us have different experiences, some say using META TAGS is a good idea (myself included) and some say that it won't matter if you don't use it. I personally believe that using META TAGs is the right approach. Many search engines still give important to meta tags such as MSN and Yahoo! Believe it or not but I have a site ranking indexed much better than the one that doesn't have Meta tags in it. Also, I believe it's only the Meta Keywords tag that Google doesn't really give any importance to anymore but that doesn't mean that searche engines like G, Y and Live don't give any importance to other Meta tags. As for keywords, ah well, if only finding the right keywords was the answer then we wouldn't have been writing unique content, building links and doing oh-so-many-things that one must do to rank well for ANY given keyword. Besides, you do not need to see the source code to find what keyword is being targetted. You can go through the site and find it yourself by reading the content and titles etc.
META tags are still very important, just not as important as other SEO techniques. Don't believe anyone that tells you they are not needed.
meta "Description" is probably the most important, along with "title" tag, IMHO, they provide your "shop window" in the search results, IE. what "snippet" searchers see and decide if its worth clicking on your link there or someone else's. see Improve snippets with a meta description makeover (google webmaster blog) http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-snippets-with-meta-description.html
Devalued or not, I don't see the harm of leaving it there. But I personally feel it does serve its purpose. Not sure of how Google algorithm will think though, but there are other search engines besides Google.
Agree, I use them and I think they are still important to all other search engines except google. No harm at all to leave them, but still try not to spam with keywords in them.
There are definately a lot of threads in this and other forums about meta tags; essential i'd say yes to using html meta tags.
hi all You should have a look at that, that's an article from the 4th december on Google's blog, written by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, at Google Zürich: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/answering-more-popular-picks-meta-tags.html basically only title as a real influence on SERP, the others have other purposes. I personally use them all the time. HTH
One SEOan told me that Google dont use meta tags anymore.... I asked about that because... one of my site was ranked for the target keywords... but I dont have that keywords in the home page and dont have a meta tags too....
Ya I agree that the entire meta-tags are important...more for the search eninges to read. Make sure all your pages have unique meta tags...
meta tags are ignored by search engines but google is only using "meta description" to show a good desc. on serp. so use meta desc. and ignore meta keywords
Of course the title tag is important because it is displayed in Google search results. And, of course, description is important for the same reson. I don't use the "author" meta tag. I do enter keywords, though I don't know if they do any good or not. It only takes a few seconds... so why not? As long as I'm in there typing a title and description, it doesn't kill me to enter a few keyword phrases. Salud! -FB
Yes, take time to make any effort possible to put related text where ever you can. Don't flood your meta, make it very relative to your site's text/content. Take time to label your links and images too with titles and alt tags.