Are meta tags useless?

[matt-14567]

I thought they were, but I don't work for a full-fledged SEO agency. I'm a copywriter at a marketing firm so my SEO efforts are generally limited to inserting keywords into on-page content, page titles, and URLs.

However, one of our clients works with an SEO agency. Whenever we add a new page to the client's website, they ask the SEO agency for keyword recommendations, which are then passed along to us to implement. The recommendations always include meta tags, so I guess I was wrong about them being useless?

Can anyone tell me the purpose of meta tags? Thanks!

[JaredMumford]

View the page source (right click + view page source), look in the section.  Youll see it -

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2" />

Tip: if theres a lot of stuff crammed into the HEAD section, just CTRL-F and search for ```
(meta name="keywords") without the parenthesis

[StreamlineMetrics]

Simply view the source of a webpage and you can see the Meta Keyword tag in the HTML code. To view the source, go to a webpage, right click and select "View Page Source" and you'll see the HTML code. Hope that helps!

[matt-14567]

Thanks for the answer! That's basically what I thought.

But how can competitors see our client's meta keywords? Where do they show up?

[JaredMumford]

You're opening a can with this question!

The efficacy of meta tags is much debated. Most people believe that the keyword meta tag has no effect whatsoever on SEO, and some believe the same to be true for the meta description.

The original purpose of the meta keywords tag was to help Search Engines understand what your page was about. After years of unabashed over-optimization, the tag slowly became less and less of a signal.

The meta description tag is a brief description of the page, and is sometimes used as the description in the SERPs. There are varying arguments on the efficacy of this tag as well, although it can be useful from a clickthrough conversion standpoint.

I'm sure youll get a lot of varying opinions on this one!

[StreamlineMetrics]

Meta Keywords are worthless. None of the major search engines use them as a ranking factor anymore. If anything, their use can actually have a negative impact since you will be revealing your targeted keywords to your competitors. (Most competent SEOs can determine your targeted keywords by looking at your site anyways but no need to make their job that much easier!)

That being said, Meta Description is still important, even if they aren't necessarily considered a ranking factor, they allow you to have control over the snippet of text that shows up under your listing in the SERPs.