Meta tags are small pieces of information that are often included as part of a web page. They are invisible to the user (unless they choose to view the HTML code of the page), but visible to the search engines. Using meta-tags to specify keywords or a description for a web page is not an HTML standard convention nor requirement, but it is a widely accepted use of the meta-tags.

There are many types of meta-tag, but from the search engines’ perspective, the most important ones are the Title tag (which contains the page title), Keywords tag (contains keywords associated with the content of the web page) and the Description tag (that provides a brief description of the page).

In the beginning, search engines gave much weight to the Keyword and the Description meta-tags, because they helped to determine a web page’s relevancy related to a search query. There was a time when a “smart” use of meta-tags could make the difference between a good and a poor positioning in the search engines’ listings. However, those times are over…

The misuse of meta-tags was the main reason for which search engines do not rely on them so heavily any more. Unscrupulous webmasters used meta-tags to mislead the search engines in “believing” that a web page’s content was related to a particular topic just to attract traffic. Indeed, nobody can guarantee that the keywords entered are describing the content of a web page, and one can easily use popular keywords (like “sex”, or “free pics”) to artificially inflate the number of visitors.

However, being one of the few techniques capable of helping search engines to “understand” human-produced content, meta-tags are still used by many search engines. It is necessary to stress that no search engine relies heavily on them any more, while some search engines ignore them completely.

In the past, meta-tag optimization was THE key-point in any search engine optimization strategy. Nowadays, meta-tags still matter, but other factors (like link popularity keyword density) are far more important.