Meta tags

Do search engines still look at meta tags?

If yes what should they be ?
Should they contain only phrazes from body and/or titile?

 

Wouldn't hurt to add keyword and description meta tags, although probably only a few search engines still use them.

 

I usually add a *short* one-sentence description and 2 or 3 keywords *max* They don't carry much weight though.

 

I still use them in every of my pages. Some search-engines still use them as the text showing at their results

 

title and description still important to be on SE's not only on SERps but for your visitors.

 

You may find that having a unique description for each page will get you out of Google's Supplement index...

Cryo.

 

concur at the bit about unique descriptions helping with the supplemental index (or not getting indexed at all).

some meta tags still matter... but not so much for ranking purposes, really.

google will still, say, follow nofollow, noindex rules in a meta tag. but I'm guessing that's not what you meant.

strictly speaking, the title is metadata in the loose sense of the word-- not the strict-- and in that case, yes, it most definitely counts, and counts a lot.

 

I still use unique meta tags for my sites. It especially helps in avoiding supplemental results on google if you have similar content. I know the major engines don't use them as much as they used to but I have seen results on some smaller engines that used my meta-description verbatim for the ranking description.

If done well it doesn't hurt and shouldn't take too much time.

 

I think Yahoo & Msn still gives important on Meta tags. I think in meta tags Title & description are very important. Even Google gives important on this tags..

 

Seems that wordpress blog software do not show meta keywords and descriptions tags in pages with articles.

Does it really matter?

 

100% it does really matter. You need to re-code wordpress to do this for you.

 

google surely gives importance even if i read everywhere it doesn`t. i testes this by making a blank page with meta tags, and guess what, the page was indexed with its meta data..

 

Short answer: It's important

Long answer: It's important if its easily fixable... If you've got php includes or it's relatively easy to add them into the pages then do it... If you're looking at hundreds of hours of work to add meta tags to thousands of pages... Your time can be spent in better ways.

 

or get a plugin.

it being indexed with its meta data does not mean the meta data helps it rank.

it's possible it does, but I think that if that's the case, it's been devalued to an insane extent versus, say, back in 1998 or something.

 

It doesn't help the rankings but it does help the click through rate on the serps. And you will avoid going supplemental.

 

still well worth doing. it cant hurt after all if the SE have a little more information about your site. might bump you up a couple of places in the SERPs if your lucky.

 

helps the CTR on the serps if you know how to write it correctly, anyway.

unfortunately a lot of meta descriptions people use are absoluetly horrid from a ad copy point of view... although I guess that could be a fortunate thing, if the sites in question are your competition.

 

Yeah, search engines like Google rely more on the title and content, meta tags like keywords and descriptions are also important for your website. Robots is one of the most used meta tags by websites in case they want privacy for their websites