Meta Tag Considerations

[roxxy]

Though most largest search engines do not 'spider' the keyword Meta Tags on your page, and in some cases ignore these completely, the use of Meta Tags on your page still serves an important purpose. There are literally hundreds, even thousands of smaller search engines scattered all across the Internet. Whilst the bigger engines tend to 'spider' whole pages instead and obtain their results from that, these smaller search engines don't have as much physical space to work with and must do things differently. It is in these particular engines you will find that Meta Tags are still very important.

[Spiralxs]

A site’s Meta tags may not be as important as it used to be before, however I feel that Meta Description is something you can’t just ignore. A site’s Meta description should contain a brief description of your website focusing on the areas and services that your business is specialized in.

[donecweb]

I agree with Spiralxs.

[Andy]

Yes, meta description is used by Google if you provide it. But you don't have to.

Does anyone that uses the keyword meta tag have any proof that it provides traffic from smaller search engines? Post a screenshot of your stats maybe?

Over 90% of my traffic comes from Google. Maybe 1 % or less from dogpile etc.

Here are some stats from one of my websites:

Links from an Internet Search Engine - Full list
- Google   280   438
- Microsoft Bing   25   28
- Google (Images)   14   22
- Yahoo!   10   12
- Stumbleupon (Social Bookmark)   8   8
- Yandex   5   5
- Unknown search engines   1   1
- MyWebSearch   0   1
   343   8.7 %   515   12.4 %
Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)
- http://www.ig.gmodules.com/gadgets/ifr   59   59

So I maybe got 1 visitor from a small search engine. Even my experiment with a Google Gadget (that I did one time years ago) provided more traffic than all the non-Google search engines.

Yahoo! delivered less traffic than Google images LOL.

So am I making a mistake by not using the keywords meta tag?

[donecweb]

So am I making a mistake by not using the keywords meta tag?

I don't think so.

[SRoy]

Metatag may not be the only thing that crawlers give attention to, but it is still important to have a metatag focusing on the content of the page and using similar keywords as the page does. 

[Jimmau]

I think the question is more what you can do that cost you nothing to do that can improve your optimisation so I still create good meta tags even if it is not the more relevant factor it takes 10 min why not do it if you can?

[Andy]

I think the question is more what you can do that cost you nothing to do that can improve your optimisation so I still create good meta tags even if it is not the more relevant factor it takes 10 min why not do it if you can?

It may cost you since it can reveal that you are trying to game the system maybe?

[donecweb]

Andy, I don't see how using proper meta tags could be seen as gaming the system.

[Andy]

Andy, I don't see how using proper meta tags could be seen as gaming the system.

I was thinking about if you were to over-use keywords in tags. I guess you are right in that it should not be a problem if you are using meta tags as they were intended to be used.