Meta Tags

[zardac]

I was just wondering how important meta tags are to my site. OK, so you may say that they are very important BUT let me tell you that I've looked up sites that have great search engine rankings and they do not have much by way of meta tags. What do you think, are we just fooling ourselves by thinking meta tags really make all the difference?

[grant]

Focus on creating content that people want to look at and/or read.

Good info for those concerned. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

[zardac]

So you're saying that if I have great content I'm not bound to use meta tags? Sometimes I feel like you might have super good content and then put stupid meta tags in and rupture your ranking.

[Josh]

Search engines see your content but their just a spider - it's just HTML to them. Where as your regular visitors come for the content and they don't see the HTML .. they read and understand the unique stuff your site has to offer. Although I'd still stick meta tags in just incase as some search engine spiders do take them into account and your new visitors could well come through that search engine.

[Andan]

META tags are important for site rankings and such in various search engines. Also helps out in your SEO score and overall Alexa rankings.

You can basically get obsessed over ranking in the top 10, but have next to no content or just spam content.

Not something I advocate highly for since people tend to stop working on content and concentrate only on getting rich quick.

In the end, I'm with Josh. I still use them, but only so my site gets crawled and so I have a higher chance of attracting visitors.

[zardac]

Thanks for all the input I really appreciate it. Whats the most essential meta tags I should use just keywords and description?

[grant]

Keywords and description are the most important. Date might be good to put your last update in, but I don't know if it matters for search motors.