Since early August when Yahoo! confirmed they were indeed reading meta tags again, there have been a lot of questions on forums (and by clients) about what it means. Should companies that had overlooked meta tags until now, add them back on their sites?
Meta tags were never a silver bullet, or the integral way to get a site ranked well. They may have had strong favor back in ’96 or so, but it was learned very early that site owners would stuff them full of anything they could to get a better ranking.
Meta tags are like perfume. Follow me here. If you are going out on the town for a nice dinner and a show, you’ll probably get all dressed up. You’ll dust off some finer clothes, dig back into the closet for the good shoes and put one some seldom worn jewelry. And, maybe a dash of perfume.
The perfume, or cologne for a guy, isn’t what makes you looking dashing – it’s a detail to the attire. That’s what meta tags are to a site. They don’t pump up your rankings, but they round off the SEO offering, making a complete package.
Meta tags are still argued by SEO-types. Some will swear you should ignore them. I say, use them. It really doesn’t take that much time to add them to a site and they will help some. So why not round of the attire to make a nice, full SEO package?
And I know for a fact, since early August, many site owners have been reaching back into their closets and dusting off meta tags. For those of us that never ignored them, were first in line to dance with Yahoo!.
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