Are Metatags Dead?

It is late, we have an IT Summit to attend tomorrow, and the last thing I feel like writing about are MetaTags… But we have a lot more stuff coming up, so I really have to get ahead on some blog posts.

The title is just a question I spied online recently. Cannot remember where. One source said they were certain metatags had no value anymore, and that their sites did better without them.

I’ve noticed for a long time that sites that we forget the metatags on (hey it happens), don’t really do any better after adding them. But I’d not decide to stop using them yet, simply because SEO is incredibly complex to measure.

No two sites are equal. It is the nature of search engine indexing and rating that they CANNOT be identical. So they are always different – different content, different tags, different page coding, different structure, different topical focus, etc. And it would be VERY hard to pinpoint any kind of “doing better” to a lack of metatags, when there are so many factors which can influence performance between two sites.

I don’t sweat the tags anymore. We pay more attention to strategic content, title tags, and intelligent alt tags. Meta tags are just something you do – but it isn’t where I concentrate my effort. Usually, if you’ve done those other things right, you already have the keyword list anyway, and you have enough other text that whipping out a logical description tag isn’t very time consuming.

The one thing I can say for certain is, do not look at metatags as the first line of work for SEO. But then, we always have said that you create good content first, and a good title tag second, and that both of those should be included in a site that is structured well. Those tactics get you further than any degree of metatag optimization, because they are the essence of the website.