Meta Tags, still important?

Many people believe the meta tags (key words added into the head tag of the html) are necessary.  At one point meta tags were considered a relatively important factor by search engines. AltaVista and other older search engines used them to help determine a site’s theme as well as relevance to a given term. This is no longer the case; search engines now rely on much more advanced techniques to do this.

Experience with the tag has showed it to be a spam magnet. Some web site owners would insert misleading words about their pages or use excessive repetition of words in hopes of tricking the crawlers about relevancy. For this reason, Excite (which also owned WebCrawler) resisted added support. Lycos quietly dropped its support of the tag in 1998, and newer search engines such as Google and FAST never added support at all.

Keywords, however, are important for your site.  Clarify Designs can help you optimize your website with the right keywords in the right locations so that your site is picked up by search engines.  There are a number of other steps we take to optimize your site.  Contact us today to discuss more about how we can help with getting more traffic to your site.