Well, you can’t swing a dead cat now days without hitting an SEO that has a differing opinion when it comes to a website’s meta tags. Besides the cultural sensitivity issues surrounding swinging a dead cat, some SEO’s will argue that meta tags are dead while others will say they are very much alive.

But, many times this is an apples and oranges argument since some search engine optimizers are talking about one aspect of meta tags while another SEO is talking about another. I can’t tell you how many message boards I’ve been on where someone will state, “The search engines don’t use the meta tags.”

This is one of those revolving door issues that surrounds whether or not the search engine “display” the meta tags of a page in their search results. Over at Search Roundtable they’ve taken a look about how search engines are currently using the Description meta tag for display purposes.

But, whether or not a search engine uses the meta tags to pull from in order to display a website in the results is a different argument than do the search engines use this information in order to rank a site appropriately. Some will argue this point, but the short answer is, yes, search engines use the meta tag data to rank websites.

I’ve had customer after customer come to me with keywords stuffed into their meta tag areas and by simply removing the repeating keywords the pages were able to recover. This shows me that the search engines do give value to the words written in the meta tag areas.

Over at Search Engine Watch, Eric Enge has a slightly different take on whether meta tags are valued or not by the SE’s, saying that they have been devalued over the years because of spammers. Enge points out that trust towards webmasters to do the right thing is coming back in vogue, though, especially in regard to Yahoo.

Meta tags are clearly not one of the primary sources anymore from which search engines use to rank pages. But, they still important on a smaller scale for most websites and SEO’s need to pay attention to meta tag optimization in order to gain rankings and avoid penalties.

Filed under: Meta Tags