Are meta tags still important to SEO?

[susapra]

There seem to be conflicting opinions on this one, so what is your view:
Are meta tags still relevant to SEO and do spiders take any notice of them?
Thanks


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[ChrisKellum]

If you mean "meta tags," then yes. If you mean "meta keywords," then no. lol

To break it down a bit:

The DTD statement (that very first line which says in what HTML/XHTML language your code is written in) actually does matter. With the correct one, your pages can actually load faster - makes your traffic happy, as well as generally leading to deeper crawls.

Character set tag is also important for the above reasons. Also, this should actually come before the title tag. Some older WYSIWYG editors get this wrong.

The title tag is the most important aspect of on-page SEO. Also, it is very effective when used to "sell the click." Google will display up to about the first 65 characters (I think I've gotten to 67, but let's say 65 to be safe), so you can create a compelling title to grab more clicks from organic search traffic.

Meta description tags are certainly not what they used to be years ago, but there does appear to be a small ranking increase by properly using the keyword in it. It is also very important in continuing to sell the click. If your keyword is in the description and someone searches it, Google will generally default to the meta description, rather than pulling text snippets from the page. This should be to your advantage, as your description should be written like an ad. Google will display 150 characters.

The meta keyword tag has not had any weight in Google in quite some time. The other guys still use it though, so it's a good idea to use it. Just don't put anything in there that you wouldn't want your competition to swipe, as its the first place they're going to look for keywords.

Meta robots is useful if you're trying to keep a page from being indexed, or links from being followed (robots.txt can also take care of the same things). It is also useful if your site is listed in YDIR or DMOZ and the search engines are pulling those descriptions rather than your meta description. You can block that with the meta robots tag.

And last, a Google Webmaster Tools verification tag. Kind of speaks for itself - find out about problems.

[flimsy]

[ramee001]

Meta Keywords - Importance to Search Engines - 1/5; Importance to Traffic - 1/5

Meta keywords are almost completely obsolete now. On rare occasions, they will serve as a tie-breaker between two nearly identical sites. For this reason, I would suggest putting good keywords on every page on your site.

Meta Description - Importance to Search Engines - 1/5; Importance to Traffic - 3/5

Bots don't pay much attention to your meta descriptions, but good descriptions generally equate to good traffic from search engines. You see, many search engines will use your meta description as your site description - when your page comes up in search results, engines generally use at least part of your meta description to lure people to click your link. Therefore, good descriptions are very important.