Meta description and meta keyword tags are two other components in the header tag of a HTML page. Like the title tag, they were over abused — but to some extent these tags were abused even more. It used to be effective to have your pages rank high in search engines just by stuffing target keywords repetitively.

Back then, search engines only see a few places to determine if a page is relevant. The Web consists only of a handful popular domains. There were still ample of untapped keywords. Those days are long gone though.

Meta tags look like these:

<meta name="description" content="the description of the page here">
<meta name=keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">


The value of the meta description and meta keyword tags have diminished considerably over the years. In fact, I write this article just for the sake of completeness, with one extra benefit. I still witness people stuffing keywords to these tags even to this date. If you are one of them, then stop wasting time and focus on other factors.

Right now, only small search engines are looking for meta keyword and meta description tags. I believe, they will shift their focus too as soon as they realize they spend too much time to make use of this code while their time could be better spend at recognizing other components of the page or off-page factors.

Writing meta tags for each and every page you create is just a waste of time. If there is a value in that, it isn’t significant.

Don’t be surprised if new web sites and pages created nowadays neglect these tags completely.

If you persist, don’t stuff these tags with unnecessary and repetitive keywords or keyphrases, or you will more likely be accused as a web spammer. Come up with succinct description and a short list of important keywords and unique words that describe the page and pay more attention to the content and promotion instead.

Those are all I have to say about meta tags.