Are Meta Tags Dead?

Link exchange (link swap, reciprocal link trade) is a better technique!

Meta tags are small pieces of information that can be attached to a web page. They are invisible to the user, but visible to the search engines.

Meta is the Greek word for “over”, and the “meta-tags” were initially designed to carry all sort of meta-information – that is “information-about”. Using meta-tags for specifying keywords or a description for a webpage is not an HTML standard convention, but it is a widely accepted use of the meta-tags.

There are many meta-tag types, but from the search engines’ perspective, the most important are the “keywords” meta-tag (carrying keywords associated with the content of the webpage) and the “description” meta-tag (that provides a brief description of the page).

In the beginning, search engines gave much weight to the “keyword” and the “description” meta-tags, because they helped to determine a webpage’s relevancy related to a search query. There was a time when a “smart” use of meta-tags could make the difference between a good and a poor positioning in the search engines’ listings. However, those times are over…

The misuse of meta-tags was the main reason for which search engines do not rely on them so heavily any more. Unscrupulous webmasters used meta-tags to mislead the search engines in “believing” that a webpage’s content was related to a particular topic just to attract traffic. Indeed, nobody can guarantee that the keywords entered are describing the content of a webpage, and one can easily use popular keywords (like “sex”, or “free pics”) to artificially inflate the number of visitors.

However, being one of the few techniques capable of helping search engines to “understand” human-produced content, meta-tags are still used by many search engines. It is necessary to stress that no search engine relies heavily on them any more, while some search engines ignore them completely.

In the past, meta-tag optimization was THE key-point in any search engine optimization strategy. Nowadays, meta-tags still matter, but other factors (like link popularity) are far more important.