How Essential Are Meta Tags in SEO

It is true that Meta tags have ceased to be the prime factors search engines consider when ranking sites. One plausible reason could be webmasters have overly abused Meta tags that search engines had to downplay their importance in their algorithms.
Meta tags were indeed influencing factors during the initial years when they received importance by first generation search engines. However as time went by, the influence of Meta tags dramatically lost significance as more and more sophisticated search engines surfaced. This apart, spammers were abusing Meta tags by over-stuffing keywords into them.

Search engines may no longer use Meta tags for deciding the relevance and value of a page, but they certainly accord importance to them while determining how a page should be indexed. It is good to believe that in SEO nothing is unimportant. Besides, it would be imprudent to altogether dismiss the importance of Meta tag your website.
There is a proliferation of websites and today what decides the winner amongst the competing websites are usually the under-rated Meta tags. So, it will be no misstatement to say there is a revival in the importance of Meta tags in SEO.

When the importance of Meta tags appears to have become diluted, there are still a variety of Meta tags in use and with quite a few of them continuing to be relevant from a SEO perspective.

• The title tag is the chief component in informing a search engine what your page is all about. As such, the title tag is critically important.

• The description tag is resorted to while constructing a page’s description in search engine results. Many consider the description tag inescapable for SEO.

• The keywords tag is still of relevance for some search engines. The keyword tag should be used discreetly and any deliberate abuse might invite the wrath of a search engine.

• The robots tag, as a matter of fact, commands a search engine how to treat page -whether or not to index it and follow the links on the page.

• The content type tag describes the character set that is employed. It is preferable to use content tag along with the DTD declaration format.

Professional webmasters opine that although Meta keywords tag and Meta description tags are less important for SEO, they should not be totally left off the page. Learning to judiciously use Meta tags can still be worthwhile.