Some more thoughts on META keywords and descriptions and why they are still very useful today even though search engines don’t use them for actually ranking your pages.
In a sense, yes, both META tags are dinosaurs from the past. A Search Engine (SE) won’t rank your page higher for a given keyword just because it appears in your META keywords. Ditto for your META description. They were abused in the past (thinking of the heyday of Altavista) so search engines had to adapt. Today ranking high in SEs is simply a popularity contest. Simply put, the more incoming links the higher your page will rank. But that story could fill entire blogs …
But … both tags can be used to discriminate duplicate content. If two pages have similar content but different META descriptions or keywords they still have a chance of being treated as separate pages, giving you an overall boost (two pages in the index is always better than just one).
Getting yourself clear about the keywords your page is about will force you to focus more on them, thus creating a better page.
But the really important thing nowadays is your META description:
Your META description often gets used as the snippet of your page that SEs provide on their results list. This way, your description often is the first thing (besides title) a potential visitor sees. This makes it very important to craft your META descriptions very very carefully.
I hope that with this post I brought some more clarity into the matter …
Tags: description, keywords, meta, meta-description, meta-keywords, seo
June 17th, 2007 at 3:16 am
Another word on meta tags is that a lot of site search engines (although I’m not sure about Wordpress’s) still rely heavily on the keywords tag.