Why Meta Tags Don’t Matter
Ok, maybe they matter a little still. But they are on the way out. Here's why, and what you can do.
Not all that long ago, the #1 concern of site owners thinking about search engines boiled down to a simple mantra: get your coders to put in the Meta tags. “Meta tags, Meta tags, Meta tags!!” It was passed on from site owner to site owner like a voodoo chant without the chicken bones and little dolls. But it was just as magical.
Meta tags, in their design, were pure and simple. The page that a human reads so easily is nearly incomprehensible to a machine—but it’s full of HTML tags that are designed to be machine-readable. So the Meta tags were created to allow the human who made the page to talk directly to the machines and tell them what the page was about. Meta tags came in two primary flavors: a list of keywords, and a concise description. Put in the tags, the search engines will understand, and the users will find you.
Put in the Meta tags, and they will come.
Things have changed. As with just about everything that has a profit motive, there’s a lot of incentive to look out for number one—you. Since Meta tags are hidden from the user, site owners could “overload” their site’s tags with any old keyword just to get found more often in searches. At first, they put in competitor’s names, then popular celebrity names. Then unpopular celebrity names. Then it got silly, with websites that sell homemade craft supplies putting keywords like “hottest teens” and “herbal human growth hormone.” The machines kept chugging through all this nonsense without noticing. The people were desperate.
Naturally, this upset the users because they were getting bad results on their searches. That upset the search engines, because they get to show their advertising if they deliver good results.
It wasn’t too long before most of the major search engines (notably Google) started ignoring the keywords Meta tag. Almost overnight, the search results got better.
This was a hard lesson to learn. The keywords Meta tag was designed to let people talk to machines, but in doing so it let out the shadier side of people. So the search engines had to teach their machines to read like people.
This is why Meta tags are dead.
Yes, in the future, various tags will come and go in the vogue of the moment. The Man Who Invented The Web is busy concocting the Semantic Web, which is all about machines talking to machines using Meta tags. But Meta tags for people to talk to machines are a failed experiment, maybe until machines learn how to tell when things are silly.
If you are a site owner left high and dry without your Meta tags, fear not. The code masters at Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, et al, have made significant headway in making machines see a page the way a person does.
Put your keywords in the title of the page, and a person would notice. So would today’s search engines. Put the keywords in the headline, subtitle, or topic-break header. Put them between <strong> tags, and you catch folks attention. And, you guessed it, they’ve taught the machines to take notice as well.
Synonyms, antonyms, homonyms and all sorts of nyms are sorted out in precisely the way a human would: when a keyword occurs close to another word, and they’re on the same page in the thesaurus, it helps form the context of what that nymic word means. And just like a person reading a list of nonesense, if you just globbed your keywords in one big lump on the page, the search engine is going to think you’re all over the place and is going to turn the page.
In fact, there’s still plenty of things you can do to optimize your site for search engines, but these days it pretty much boils down to this:
make the page for people, and the people will come.
In the interest of fair disclosure, there is some use to the description and keywords tags, just not as much as there once was. Need an example? Head on over to CNN and take a look at the source code of any old article. You’ll see:
- Description. Notice how the description tag gives details about the article, not “Visit CNN for all sorts of news!”? This is one reason many search engines don’t care much about the description meta-tag: people, in general, don’t know how to use them. Make a complete sentence, of 10-30 words. Describe the page. Don’t take the easy way out and make one “description” and slap it into every page in your site.
- Keywords: ain’t there. It’s just not as useful as putting the headline-tag <h1> around the headline to let the machine know that’s the #1 header.
I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in knowing that the solution to our problems wasn’t to have us learn how to speak to the machines, but to teach the machines how to understand us.
