For the purpose of this blog post, when I say “Meta tags” I am referring to the Meta description and keyword tags only.

When Alta Vista was king of search and Yahoo was primarily a web directory, meta tags were powerful tools for helping a web page rank well in Alta Vista and similarly powered search engines. Lawsuits were filed by business loans whose competitors were using their trademarks in their Meta tags in an attempt to outrank them in the SERPs. And for good reason, Meta tags worked. Good Meta tags, when combined with a high keyword density, was enough to get you a high ranking in Alta Vista.

But this isn’t 1996 anymore. Thanks to Google entering the search arena and taking an intelligent approach to search algorithm design, the almost juvenile search algorithms of the past have been discarded in favor of more advanced algorithms that not only improve upon on-page interpretation but take search algorithms to an all new level by moving search factors off-page and off-site. With the onset of advanced algorithms, of which PageRank is the most famous and probably important, Meta tags were no longer a necessary part of modern search algorithms.

But some people just have a hard time letting them go. It’s understandable. They were a part of our roots. For the longest time the most famous answer to ranking well in the search engines was, “use Meta tags” for years. There are (unfortunately) still countless web pages praising their importance. But blindly and persistently offering them praise does not suddenly make them helpful for SEO. And it’s not hard to see why:

1. Meta tags are never ever displayed to a user on a webpage (meta tags do not render). The question is simple: if the content is not visible to the user and has absolutely no effect on their experience viewing/using the web page, then should it be considered when ranking the page? No! Why should it be? If it isn’t actually part of the page’s content or affects the content in any way, why should it be used in deciding how relevant the content is for search?
2. Meta tags can contain content that has absolutely no meaning to the webpage. How many websites have you seen with “Britney Spears” stuffed into its Meta tags in order to come up for that search term even though “Britney Spears” has absolutely nothing to do with the page content? It happens every day. Because Meta tags are not displayed to end users webmasters can openly and blatantly abuse them by stuffing unrelated content within them. It’s a sad but proven and well known fact.
3. Search engines are too smart to need us to tell them what a page is about. Think about what search engines can do today:
   1. Index and categorize billions of webpages daily
   2. Parse a webpage and determine its meaning through analysis of its semantic markup
   3. Use off page factors to also determine its meaning
   4. Determine relevant related sites to influence the power of their incoming links
   5. Filter out duplicate content on other sites
   6. Filter out duplicate content on the same website

   Do you really think they can do all of this, and a whole lot more, but still need to rely on webmaster to tell them what a page is about? Only an arrogant webmaster would think so.

4. Google flat out says they don’t affect your rankings. If logic and reason are not enough for you, then maybe having it spelled out for you will do the trick! In the Official Google Webmaster Blog Google clearly states that the Meta description tag is not used in their ranking algorithm (emphasis mine):
   

   While the use of a description meta tag is optional and will have no effect on your rankings, a good description can result in a better snippet, which in turn can help to improve the quality and quantity of visitors from our search results.

   If you read the entire blog post you will notice they don’t even mention the Meta keyword tag. That’s how useless it is!

One popular misconception is that the Meta keyword tag is helpful in ranking well Yahoo search. This is based on the fact that if you do a search for an obscure phrase that is in your Meta keywords tag you can see that page in their SERPs. And that proves what? That the Meta keyword tag helps your rankings? If that is true then why can’t anyone duplicate this with any keyword that people actually search for? There are two possible reasons for this:

1. They don’t use the Meta keyword tag for rankings and only return them in the SERPs to show they are successfully parsing the page
2. They have so little value that they can only be found using extremely obscure terms

For the sake of argument, let’s assume #1 is wrong and let’s say they do have some value albeit a minuscule amount. Because they have so little value they functionally have no effect on your rankings. For those of you that are into technicalities, you can say they do affect your rankings and be technically correct. If the best it can do is get me ranking for terms that no one searches for because they are utter nonsense, or if it will boost my page’s ranking from position #3,500 to #3,498, then it is a non-factor for SEO.

Meta Tags are just one of a constellation of SEO factors that Google uses to rank your web page. And with Google’s evolution beyond just matching up the “strings” in Meta Tags with the keywords in search queries, your on page SEO optimization needs to evolve as well.

In the last couple of years, Google’s shift to using semantic search means that it thinks more in terms of topics, topics comprised of related words rather than in terms of a single keyword out of context.

And in fact, keywords in your title tags may not matter as much as they once did. This SearchEngineJournal article on important SEO tags for 2016 cited a Backlinko research study that found that a keyword optimized title tag was associated with a better ranking, but that the correlation was smaller than it once was.

What often happens, is that after a website is built, the site owner will hire someone to “SEO” the website. In the old days that often meant updating the meta tags with promising keywords with good search volume, even if the page didn’t mention the keyword at all.

But meta tag optimization shouldn’t be a separate and isolated activity. It no longer works (if it ever did) to optimize your page for a keyword that doesn’t match the topic of the page. On page SEO optimization is now a holistic practice where your page needs to fully address a “theme” that involves many closely related keywords both in your meta tags and in the content of the page.

So is meta tag optimization dead? No, not exactly. But the way you are doing it might be.

Having said all that, let me make it clear that Meta tags should still be used on your web pages. They may not have any direct SEO value but they still do serve other purposes. The most powerful of them, as already mention above, is the use of the Meta description tag by Google and other search engines to display their content in their SERPs under a page’s listing. Naturally good copy in your Meta description tag may help your click through rate. Also, other software may use the Meta tags as a part of its operation. A common example are web directory software that automatically pulls a web page’s Meta tags when it is submitting to that directory. Plus who knows what future Web applications will arrive that may find a compelling use for Meta tags.

So, be sure to create well written Meta tags when creating your pages. Just don’t do so with the expectations that they will improve your search engine rankings.