Will Meta Tags Improve My Rankings?

Unfortunately, the majority of the major search engines do not recognize the meta keyword tag at all. A larger number do recognize the meta description tag for the purpose of creating a summary for the page. The prevailing philosophy is that search engines prefer to index text that is clearly VISIBLE to the user, although exceptions are certainly made. The engines in general consider invisible text, such as that found in meta tags, as "untrustworthy" since they can be easily abused by an unethical Webmaster. For example, someone could list out many keywords that do not apply to their page's content, or they could repeat a keyword many times in hopes of boosting their rankings.

Of the engines that do support meta tags, none are thought to give extra "relevance" to words appearing in meta tags versus elsewhere on the page. In fact, most engines give words in these tags less weight than if they had appeared elsewhere on the page such as in the body area or the page title.

You might then conclude that meta tags are useless? Well, not quite. You definitely want to include a meta description tag on every page to avoid the search engine making up its own description from random excerpts on the page.

In regard to the meta keyword tag, many experts believe that including a keyword in BOTH your meta tags and in other areas of your page CAN help improve your rankings. For example, let's say your keyword was "Star Wars collectibles" and it appeared in the body text that is visible to the user. If the keyword were also included in your meta keyword tag, then that would reinforce to the search engine that "Star Wars collectibles" was an important theme on this page. Although no extra relevancy boost is given for including the keyword solely in the meta tag, some engines may look to the meta tag as a way to reinforce their belief that a page is relevant if all the other more important factors "check out" too.

In any case, including the tags are unlikely to hurt your rankings if you follow a few simple rules. Be careful not to repeat the same keyword more than two or three times in the tag. Never repeat the same word twice in a row or you may trigger a search engine's "spam filter." Lastly, never include keywords that do not apply to the content of that page.