How useful are Meta Tags?

Posted in Web Design, WordPress by Douglas Karr Friday, February 2nd at 9:37 pm

Meta tags are information tags within the header of a web page that provide additional data to engines who may be searching for it. I’ve read a few articles online about meta tags and how useful they are or are not. There are a lot of opinions our there. Unlike other sources of subscribers, there’s really no means to measure the impact that meta tags may be having on your website.

I would love to hear some opinions from our Search Engine experts out there on whether or not meta tag work is useful or useless. My opinion is simply this… they don’t hurt the user experience, so I add them thinking that they can’t hurt my overall results. Can they?

There are quite a few Meta plugins at WordPress available to enhance your meta tags within your site. I don’t actually utilize any of them, I just edit my header.php file and have the following:

Here’s a rundown of the tags and explanation why I have them:

Content-Type is a required tag that tells browsers and crawlers what type of content your site is displaying so that it may be appropriately viewed or captured.
Generator. I see notes on this often that it should be kept in the header so folks can measure WordPress usage… where can we find this usage?
verify-v1. This is a Google Webmaster verification meta tag so that I can utilize Google’s webmaster’s tools… sometimes a very helpful site. The only thing that bothers me is that I error on some validation sites for the use of this unrecognized meta tag type.
blogburst-verify. This is a site that I happened across that I’m testing to see if it helps bring additional readers to my site. So far, zilch. And it’s another unrecognized tag.
author. Yup, that’s me!
The next three are geo tags to let geographic search engines locate and index my site for its geographic location. I used my own site, Address Fix, to generate these. Geotagging hasn’t hit the big-time yet, but it’s my prediction that it will and this will be useful in the long run.
Robots. I welcome all robots to crawl my site and index it for searching. Is this necessary? I have a robots.txt file that basically states the same thing.
name, description, and keywords are pretty self explanatory. I do utilize Ultimate Tag Warrior to auto generate keywords based on the page. I used to have those keywords listed first – but then a couple sites I used like Silktide told me that my site wasn’t found for my first x number of keywords.
pics-Label – this is an Internet Content Rating Association tag. I’m not sure how many content viewing engines and child safety software use ICRA tags anymore, but it makes me feel a little better that I’m telling folks that I have a site safe for anyone.