Back in 1994, when the internet was young and search engines were new, the developers working for the search engines were trying to figure out an easy way to help their “bots” spider the web and index pages found on the web. They petitioned for “meta tags” to be accepted, and people started adding them to their websites.

The point of meta tags was that it was something you could add to your site that summarized your site without having to have it showing for the viewer. They were supposed to act like a card catalogue at the library in that they provide a good method of locating the information you are seeking.

This was a great idea, and webmasters around the world started adding keywords and descriptions to their web pages. Very soon, however, people noticed that their sites would get indexed depending on how many keywords they had in their meta tags, and how often they were repeated, thus, if your entire description, title and keyword tag was just “shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes…” etc, then you should rightly get placed on top of the search engines for the term “shoes”. Another thing people were doing, was adding terms in their keyword tag that had nothing to do with their site at all. They would notice that a lot of people would type in “sex” as a search term, and so stuff their keyword and description metas with that - even though they might be selling only shoes. The thought process was to try to trick the user into clicking on your website.

Obviously, if you’re looking for something specific, and you end up on a page that has nothing to do with what you were looking for, you’re going to be pretty angry. It seems like a rediculous strategy now, but we’ve grown up as a society online quite a bit since then.

Why would they do that? Well, the mentality grew from a few concepts. The idea is, if you get a million visitors, and 1% of them convert into a sale, then you’re making 10,000 sales. It also stemmed from the food court in the mall concept. You have an almost captive audience. They’re already in the mall, probably not done shopping, so they’ll want to come over and spend money on your food selections as well as being in the mall for whatever they’re looking for.

There are some problems with these outdated ideas. Generally, if you’re looking for something online, you are only annoyed by not finding exactly what you’re looking for. The mid-90s idea of “surfing the web” is all but dead. This is 2008. You want to know election predictions? Go online. You want to know what the weather’s going to be like today? Go online. Better yet? Google it.

So. By 1998, search engine companies were phasing out the use of the keyword meta as far as a classification of a a site. Google, reportedly, has never used the keyword meta for anything at all. The meta description is used by many search engines (including Google) as the display description in your listing. In other words, while it does not show up on your site, it does show on the search engine display, and is usually the determining factor on whether or not someone will actually click on your link. So, the description tag is very important, but only for conversion, and not for rankings.

Without using the much-abused keyword tag, how are search engines deciding what your site is about?

They look at your site’s content, for one. If your site is about shoes, then you would want to have text descriptions about your shoes. Since this is what search engines now read, it’s tempting to stuff it full of keywords, but remember that we’ve all grown up, and keyword stuffing is now considered an offense by most of the major search engines.

Something rather striking today, however, is the fact that Yahoo seems to have started supporting the keyword tag again. This is one of the reasons why Yahoo’s search results are actually different from Google’s. This means you can’t actually leave your meta keywords off your website. Yahoo itself recommends that you only add keywords that actually pertain to the page they are located on, and to not put a blanket set of keywords that affect every page of your site. Is this a revival of the keyword tag? We’ll see. It’s definitely not got much weight as far as determining what the site is about, however.

Today, we use the page Title, meta Description and meta Keywords. The page Title is still considered one of the best resources for telling the search engines what your site is about. The meta Description should be thoughtfully laid out as a lure for people making searches online for your keywords. The meta Keywords should only reflect the keywords you actually have listed on the page. You can use them as a reminder of what keywords to use when writing content for your page.

It is important to have your metas laid out correctly, even though they don’t carry much weight at the moment. They are used by search engines for various applications, and thus that makes it worthwhile to make sure they’re up to date and customized. However, it is not advised to work solely on your meta tags and nothing else. That is a surefire way to see your site’s rankings never move. There a lot of other tricks to use when working on website rankings. More on that later.

Tags: Description Tag, Keywords, Meta Tags, SEO, Title Tag