Do I need meta tags on my website?

People, get over it! Meta Tags are DEAD!

The simple premise of a meta tag is a hidden field where a webmaster can tell the search engine what the website is about.

Before anyone knew what was going on, webmasters used the meta tags to spam the search engines. A few bad apples ruined it for everyone.

Just because you say your website is about "handmade jewelry" does not mean that it really is.

Search engines are big business. People expect good results. So they are not going to let you tell them what your site is about.

Search engines are going to make determination about your pages themselves. To them the only real value a page has is the actual text in the page. Like this article about wasting your time on meta tags.

The logic I have given you is infailable. You can't argue with it, you can substantiate it in any search engine help section. But none the less, people keep using them.

Here at pageBuzz, we added a tool to create meta tags so people are happy. Quickly add meta tags to any website, because they don't want to hear from us that meta tags are not useful. What would we know about websites anyway?

Google had to do the same thing by added a submission form so people would think they have added their website to google.

Despite their help section stating, you are wasting your time using the submission form, I am sure millions of people submit their websites that way.

The form appeared afters years of not having one and likely under pressure from site owners looking for their website in google and not understanding google will crawl them automatically.

If you give them a form, they are happy. They submit the site, they think they did the right thing.

Whether google uses any of the data submitted is another story, but it keeps people from e-mailing google and asking when their site will be listed.

The same is true of meta tags, search engines like google just ignore them. If you want to spend time adding them, go for it. But it wont help you one bit and it can ultimately hurt your search rank.

Take a look at these excepts from GOOGLE's own website:

Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no.

Q: Why doesn't Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

So it you don't want to take my word for it, at least listen to the company that actually runs one of the search engines.

If anyone is telling you to use meta tags to improve SEO they have no clue what they are doing and could damage your website SEO in the process.

Now let me clarify, I am talking about META Description and Keyword Tags!

There are other meta tags that are in fact important and used by the search engines, so lets not forget about them.

Refresh
Robots

The Meta Refresh Tag

This tag is not use by the search indexes, but it is used by browsers, so pages with fast refresh rates or redirects will often be ignored by the search engines. So this is a tag you should avoid unless you need the page to refresh at a regular rate for the user.

The Robots Tag

This meta tag can tell a search engine to index a page, follow links or ignore the page. This is typically done with a robots.txt file in the root directory but can also be added to pages. With any luck, i you want a page excluded from the searches adding a NOINDEX rule to the tag will result in the page being removed or not indexed in the first place.

Of course this has little value to most users but still, it is a meta tag that the search engines do use.

The Revisit-After Meta Tag

This tag can be very useful if you want the search engine to check back when you do updates. Typically they will check back based on how frequently the see updates on your website. But using this meta tag will tell them how often they should check back.

If you set the period for 365 days, then the search engines know you don't plan to update the page until next year and they can save resources by not crawling it.

If you set it to 1 day, they will come back each day looking for updates. The problem is, they don't want to waste resources and if you don't have updates every day, they will stop coming anyway.

The truth is, google and Bing, Yahoo and others all have their own schedule and they wont crawl a page just because you want them to. So the revisit meta tag can actually be more destructive than anything else.

Back to the Point - Using Meta Tags

The point is, there is little sue for meta tag in modern websites, that has bee the case for many years.

There are some instances where the searches will use the "description" meta tag as the display text in the search results, but that can also be counter productive and that is probably why they do it.

If you were trying to trick them, now it is your customers that will see the tag and if it does not give accurate information, they wont click on your link in the results pages.

Personally, I don't see any value in meta tags for 99.9% of the pages online. Yest SEO experts, despite all the data online, still swear by them and charge people money to set them up.

If you pay anyone to SEO your website by using meta tags, you are a CHUMP!