How are Meta tags used by search engines?
This is an excerpt from Wikipedia “Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.

They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO), where different methods are explored to provide a user’s site with a higher ranking on search engines. In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a webpage and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines” and thus, high traffic to the website.

As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a website. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.

Meta elements have significantly less effect on search engine results pages today than they did in the 1990s and their utility has decreased dramatically as search engine robots have become more sophisticated. This is due in part to the nearly infinite re-occurrence (keyword stuffing) of meta elements and/or to attempts by unscrupulous website placement consultants to manipulate (spamdexing) or otherwise circumvent search engine ranking algorithms.

While search engine optimization can improve search engine ranking, consumers of such services should be careful to employ only reputable providers. Given the extraordinary competition and technological craftsmanship required for top search engine placement, the implication of the term “search engine optimization” has deteriorated over the last decade. Where it once implied bringing a website to the top of a search engine’s results page, for the average consumer it now implies a relationship with keyword spamming or optimizing a site’s internal search engine for improved performance.

Major search engine robots are more likely to quantify such extant factors as the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits, click-throughs, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness, geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.”

1. The facts…
2. -Many web companies will still input meta tags because they don’t know any better, they actually think it helps.
3. -Clients are commonly mistaken about the value of meta tags
4. -We will put in meta tags for clients not necessarily because they work, but mainly because clients want them in there and will talk about it until they are put in.

1. The reality
2. -We can make a website without meta tags rank higher than one with meta tags

1. The Action
2. -If you want us to check for Meta tags or to add more to your site, just call us at 978-632-5300.