Are Meta Tags Still Important?

I find this is a common question among many blog owners and webmasters alike. Are Meta tags still important today? In the early days of SEO many shady search engine optimization folks used meta tags and keyword stuffing with invisible text to get their sites to rank higher in the SERPS. This method does not work very well today, and will most likely get your site penalized or banned altogether from the search engines.

According To Google, they do not even acknowledge or give any relevance to the keywords meta tag. Even though Google does support some other basic meta tags which they kindly list on the follow page of their webmaster help tools page However, Google is not the only search engine on the block.

Yahoo puts a much lesser ranking score on the keywords meta tag, however, it is still used to some degree. Opinions vary on if Bing uses the meta tag.

So the question is, should you use meta tags? If so which meta tags should you use?

I believe the keywords meta tag is useful if you truly match the keywords used to the content of the web page or blog post. Even though it may not give you a considerable ranking boost, it can help the search spiders better categorize your web site. I believe that can only help you, not hurt you. I sometimes shake my head in amazement how many blogs and web sites out there have no keyword meta tag at all. I think every site should use the keywords meta tag just to be certain their sites and pages are categorized correctly.  There is more then just the keyword meta tag though.

I will list a few meta tags I think are useful below that I think everyone should use.

Essential Meta Tags

1. <meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”en-us” /> – This is a language meta tag. This tag for example tells the spider the language and region of your web page. For example this on states its English and the region is the US. Change en-us to whatever you wish. I do know Bing uses this tag to help define languages and regions related to local searches. It would make it easier to target US searchers if you declare your site en-us eh?

2.<meta name=”copyright” content=”insert name or url here”/> – This is a copyright meta tag. This tag can be useful for letting crawlers know the content you wrote is yours and original. This way if someone just scrapes your content and copy and pastes it, the crawler will still know you wrote it originally. This meta tag can never hurt you, so why not use it?

3.<meta name=”author” content=”insert name here”> – This is an author meta tag. This tag will allow you to claim authorship of a page on your site in the meta tag. I personally think think this tag is useful, and more bloggers and site owners should take advantage of this tag to claim authorship in the code and meta data of their pages.

4.<meta name=”audience” content=”all”> – I think of this tag as an unofficial rating for your site or page. I use this tag, and again this tag could never hurt you.

5. <meta name=”rating” content=”general” /> – Again this is another general rating tag that could only help your web site like the tag above. I see no reason not to use it.

6. <meta name=”distribution” content=”global” /> – This meta tag pretty much labels your site as safe for general global distribution. Search engines may use this tag, they may not, however some smaller niche search engines may and this tag isn’t going to hurt you. it could only help your site longterm.

7. <meta name=”expires” content=”never” /> – This meta tag simply states the page or content never expires, or you can set an expire date. I can’t hurt you thats for sure. So why not use it?

8. <meta name=”publisher” content=”insert name here”> – This meta tag is similar to the author and copyright tags. It allows you to declare yourself or your company as the publisher of the page or blog. I think this tag only makes your site look more professional, and this is another tag that can only help you.

Those are the 8 essential meta tags that everyone should use. I think those tags will make your blog or site look more  professional, and can help your site get better categorized. The author, publisher, and copyright meta tags allow you to claim ownership in your code, and that can only help you with the robots. The language meta tag ensures you have the proper language and region declared. Tis can really help for business that serve a small area.

Do you use any meta tags? what are your thoughts?

Comments Welcome!