If you’ve ever created your own website, viewed another website’s source code or talked to anyone in the industry, you’ve no doubt heard the term ‘META tag’ thrown around.

Depending on who you talk to, you will discover that the use and importance of META data has dropped considerably over the past 5 years or so.

Web technologies have advanced so much over the years, that many of the previously used META tags have become either redundant, irrelevant, or are simply ignored by search engines.

Does this mean you should forget about them completely? Not at all. I will talk about the 2 most commonly used META tags, Descriptions and Keywords.

META “Description”
The Description tag is actually very important and is still widely used. It will have almost no impact on your rankings, however it will vastly improve the appearance of your website when showing up in search results.

As you will notice below, Google is pulling content from a META Description tag located on www.glacier-digital.com. If a Description tag was not specified, it would simply pull the first content it could find. This method can be sufficient for some websites, however leaving any task solely up to search engines is never a good idea.

It is important to include the most detailed information in the first 2 sentences, as most search engines will only display the first 150-200 characters.

META “Keywords”
META Keywords were incredibly popular in the late 1990′s, however with that popularity came exploitation. Webmasters would stuff META keywords into their website, even if they were unrelated to the content. Slowly, but surely, search engines began ignoring or banning META keywords from their algorithms completely.

Presently, no one is 100% certain if all search engines have excluded META keywords from their search algorithms. Yahoo apparently still uses them, in conjunction with other factors in order to rank their search results.

Determining a short list of 10 to 12 keywords or phrases, relevant to the content on the specified page, would be the best course of action. Search engines change their search algorithms frequently and adhering to all rules, whether or not they are 100% effective, is never a bad idea.

There is an assortment of other META tags that are available, however it is up to you and your SEO provider to determine which ones will be applicable for your website.