An SEO Myth
META Tags will make your site rank higher
NB: UPDATE: 26/12/2008 Google has now said in its SEO Guidelines that it DOES NOT use meta keywords and does not recomend that you use them.
This is my personal pet peave. It makes me irate that many SEO companies still charge and advise people that "optimising" your meta tags will make your site rank higher!
I will say this now, META TAGS DO NOT EFFECT YOUR RANKINGS!
Just in case you missed that...
META TAGS DO NOT EFFECT YOUR RANKINGS!
I have covered this in another article on this site here - The Truth about META Tags. Despite this, the SEO Myth surrounding META tags is such a big issue I feel I need to cover it here too.
META Tags, specifically the META Keywords and META description tags used to be considered by search engines as part of the ranking criteria. It is this fact that has caused much of the current contraversy. I believe it was around 2004 when META tags were dropped from the ranking algorithm critereon.
The trouble is no one paid any attention to this despite some fairly definitive testing at the time. META tags were something that an SEO could easily manipulate in order to articifically enhance a site's ranking. The trouble was this was quickly abbused and spammed to death! Hence being dropped by search engines as a criteria for ranking.
To further confuse the issue, the META description tag is still "used" by search engines in the SERPs but not as a ranking critereon. Sometimes Google will use the text from the META description tag to display a description in its search results when there is no suitable text scrap.
So due to histroical factors there are still many people who believe that you should "optimise" your meta tags and you will get good rankings. Well, I have tested this thoroughly and it is just not the case. META Tags do not effect your search engine ranking at all. It is just a myth! It has been considered good practice up until today (15th of September 2008) but I have elected not to use them on my sites as they are simply a waste of code. View the source on this site, you won't see any meta tags!