How important are meta tags in SEO?

Hi all

I have a question. How important to SEO are meta tags like

<meta name="description" content="Your description here!" />
<meta name="keywords" content="your, keywords, here" />

I've head conflicting reports. Some people swear by them and others say not to bother as it doesn't really help. I'd just like some input from the members here. Perhaps you've had a site that didn't use them and ranked at a certain level but then had a ranking that improved after adding them (or not) Does anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks for the help

Julia

I think you will find the same beliefs here. Some people use them, some people do not.

Here is an article that Spinal wrote for the last newsletter.

I don't think they carry much weight BUT they do no harm being included so you may as well.

If you've already got a site up and running and your making it seo friendly and its going to take ages to add meta tags to every page then personallyI wouldn't bother.

As Linda said, some people think they are useful, others don't.

I'm one who thinks they are completely useless.

You may find the Wikipedia article useful. It references an SEO report "by 37 leaders" in SEO.

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Thank you all for the comments (I want you to know I'm grateful even though I don't respond to every reply... I have read them and appreciate them)
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I agree with you entirely here.* Whether they work or not doesn't really matter to me. I plan to include them just in case.* If it has a chance of giving me an edge over someone who uses the same keywords in title, url, headlines, and general content but figures meta tags don't work so doesn't bother with them then I'll make use of them.
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I'm only just developing my site so it's easy to add them to each page.
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As an aside.* I have a blog at blogspot.com which is run by google (I have to use my google id and password to get in).* Interestingly, beneath the editing window is a section titled 'labels for this post'. Would that be the same as meta tags?* I've checked the source code and it doesn't seem to have meta keywords or description.* But who knows!
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Julia

Honestly don't know on that one./ I know tagging is sort of similar. It helps searching the site and I think helps SE's but I'm not certain.

Just make sure when you add your meta tags that they are relevant to the page they're on. ie don't use the same description and tags on every page because that could harm your seo. IF the robots do check meta tags then they will think evry page has the same meaning and content.

I don't see any harm in using the description and keyword meta tags but I wouldn't go any further than that. Some people are silly about the whole thing and use every meta tag available. I personally don't think they do anything but as has been said, opinion is divided.

There are more important SEO techniques and in my opinion the lighter your code the better.

Pete.

<meta> description tags definitely have a use: search engines may use them in the search results page, as the description under the page title.

This can help give a better summary of the page content, so that users are more likely to click the link.

The search engine is not obliged to do this, however; if you write an irrelevant-seeming description, then it could be ignored.

Meta tags (description and keywords) don't carry much weight. <title> and <h1> are the most valuable tags, following by <strong> and link texts (within <a> tags).

Having said that, meta tags are used by search engines to "validate" (not the quotes) the content of your page. If your page is about "yellow cars", you should en-force the association by including "yellow cars" in the begining of your descritpion and keywords.

The article was meant to be a quick reference to all the most common topics in SEO. I can't believe I forgot to write about meta tags! ARGH!

Wow, I get up this morning to find four replies!!! Impressive

Thank you all for your comments. I've made notes of what has been said. I will use them, but only the meta description and keywords (that was all I planned on using anyway)

And spinal, you did mention meta tags, though only in passing under the <head> section. I read the article yesterday

So once again, thank you all.

Julia

In addition to the well-known meta description and meta keywords tags, there are other useful meta tags, including the meta http-equiv tag, meta refresh tag, the meta robots tag, the meta copyright tag, and the meta author tag, among others. These tags are used to instruct user agents such as web browsers and search engine spiders.

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Nashik Real estate

I don't see thye point in the meta author tag. People over use meta tags in my opinion.

Pete.

Yea I laugh when i View Source and there's a list of 20 different pointless meta tags on the page - its gotta be damaging the code/content ratio (for those of us who believe in that!)

I also hate it when people use 10 different style sheets instead of just a couple. Ok it might make it easier to edit them at a later date but, surely, it's a bit much.

Pete.

<meta> author provides information that may be useful to the reader; and because it's meta information rather than in-page content, it can be accessed directly by the user agent.

If you think code/content ratio matters, then this would be an obvious bit of code to leave out for most websites.

(I don't think code/content ratio matters, so I leave it in there.)

You may not "believe" in content to code ratios, but there are other factors closely related to this theory. One of which is the "relative position of the real content". The more junk you add to your head section, the further down the page you end up pushing you useful content...

Er...no. Or should that be, "no"?

The information in the <head> section is not displayed in the browser viewport (nor should it be read aloud by screen readers, unless requested, with the useful exception of <title>).

Adding meta information has no effect upon the main content display. That's why we have a <head> as well as a <body>. (Okay, so the <head> downloads before the <body>, which means any code in the <head> will infinitesimally increase the delay of page loading.)

If you're talking about the order that search engines read the page, rather than users, then we're back to the same old argument.