Are meta tags still important?

If you are doing some search engine optimization work on your site, you might have read here and there that meta tags aren’t relevant anymore. Does it mean you shouldn’t pay attention to them? Certainly not!

While it is true that meta tags aren’t as important as they used to be 10 years ago, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include them on your pages.  When it comes to title and description tags, just look at Google’s rankings and you will see that they still matter.

Title tags still have some weight and are still very important. However, for them to be effective, they should be related to your on page title (usually <h2> tags) and to the content of your page. If it’s not the case, they won’t do much for you.

Description tags do not have as much importance as title tags and should support your title tags to get some ranking juice. They are however very helpful to get people to click on your listings as Google still shows them in rankings (they also show snippets for page content as well). And if people click on your listings, it will increase your rankings as Google now takes into the click through rate to rank pages.

Keyword tags aren’t that important anymore but you should still include them. Lots of people might tell you to not bother as Google stated they don’t take them into consideration anymore but they are still used by other search engines and directories so they are worth being included …