Meta Tags Are Not Dead

Posted: July 28, 2009

Once again the discussion has come up that meta tags are dead and most seo is boondoggle.

Do not believe the hype!

Meta tags live.

Title tags are incredibly important.

While the effectiveness of metas might be a decent discussion for those who follow SEO closely and engage in SEO regularly, it is very misleading for those new to the arena.

I recently talked to a company who has a PR6 website (and I’m using Page Rank just to show it’s an authority domain, not to use PR for ranking purposes) who had the exact same title, meta description, and meta keywords on every page of their site. Naturally, they didn’t rank for anything outside of their company name.

They thought it didn’t matter that all the metas & title tags were the same, because the SEO community has been saying metas are dead for a while now.

I talked to another company who was about to remove all their metas & title tags because metas no longer matter.

What do you think would have happened to their rankings?

Unique title tags are one of the most important things you can have on your site.

Period. End of story. Let me repeat, if you have the same title tag on all your pages, it’s the same as naming every single chapter, headline, and page the exact same in a book and expecting a reader to be able to find information. In this case, the reader is a search engine spider – but the analogy stands.

What about meta description tags?

The meta description tag when talking ranking factors is of small importance. However, that does not mean it’s useless. If a snippet is not shown on a search page, the meta description is. Think of your meta description as the body of your ad copy. The body is what someone reads and decides to click on your natural rankings to arrive at your website.

Therefore, a good meta description tag can bring in more traffic.

If you subscribe to the theory that the sites that get the clicks from a search result can move up in the rankings (i.e. natural SERP CTR), then a good meta description can also raise your rankings because it gathers more clicks (not everyone agrees with this – and I’m not going to debate this one on either side at the moment).

Come on, the meta keyword tag – does that really matter?

On Google, not really. On Yahoo, its a small factor – but great for misspellings.

When you get into the other meta tags, such as author, they are useless.

Most CMS systems automatically create meta keyword tags; hence, it’s little work, little rewards and while you shouldn’t spend you time writing meta keywords tags. However, if the system generates an OK list (a few keywords, not thousands) then its not worth your time adding or removing this metatag from your system.

The SEO Discussion Should Be: What a good SEO company should do for you

Most of these discussions arise because SEO companies are still writing meta tags and submitting links to engines. Submitting links to search engines is a waste of time – completely agreed.

However – if all the pages of a site have the same title tag – then the SEO company should be rewriting title tags.

If all the description tags are the same – again – rewrite them.

Every time an article or SEO blog post comes out that says you don’t need meta tags – you are misleading those who are just getting started with SEO.

<updated>What I’ve found after talking with many companies about SEO is that they all think title tags and metas are the same. While the advanced SEO community is saying metas and not titles, most businesses lump metas and titles together, pretty much all the tags that end up in the <head> of a website.</updated>

While a large part of SEO is link building – having links does not mean much if you don’t have the on page factors correct.

Therefore, first fix your on page factors – then worry about link building.

Meta tags are an on page factor. They matter.

Not all meta tags are dead.

For those new to SEO:

Here’s some information to help you out:

Got the basics from those two pages? Now, here are some good resources to read:

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Related Information:

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Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Search Engines

Comments

3 Responses to “Meta Tags Are Not Dead”

Alan on July 28th, 2009 8:09 am

Great article Brad,

I’ve always been unsure how much effort to put into meta descriptions so thanks for clearing it up.

Like your point about thinking of descriptions as the ad copy – guess if you make it helpful and enticing people will click.

Alan
Brad Geddes aka eWhisper on July 28th, 2009 10:16 am

I want to clarify something…

Technically the ‘title’ tag is not a metatag. However, most companies lump all the tags that go into the website header the same way (outside of scripts, CSS, and browser specific behavior).

Therefore, as this is the way I hear companies talk about it (and I just passed 3000 businesses trained in AdWords where we talk about all kinds of marketing – I generate a lot of feedback) – its the way I’ve also the way I write about it to help keep down on confusion.
Oliver on July 31st, 2009 10:17 am

Really informative article and I like to learn new things about SEO. I will have to take these tips on board for the next site I do. Thanks