HTML Meta Tags have been around since the early days of the World Wide Web with search engines formerly relying heavily on them for the proper listing and classification of web pages. However, as search engines have become more sophisticated and the tags themselves have become subject to abuse, their importance has wained. So, Do Meta Tags Still Matter? More specifically, does my use of meta tags affect how my web page will be listed on a search engine?
My quick answer to that question is, yes, at least as far as Google search results are concerned, your description meta tag does appear to influence the content displayed with your search results listing. To demonstrate this, I'm going to give you a couple of examples from this blog based on search terms people are using on Google to find this site:
Search for "google apps cpanel":
Search for "widget subpages":
Search for "mirror cpanel server":
You will notice that the description under the link for each of these search results is "Unique insights on PHP, WordPress. and Open Source". This description corresponds to the description meta tag on each of these pages. Unfortunately, this description is ambiguous with regards to the specific content on each page.
What appears to have happened is Google has indexed these pages because they provide relevant content for the given search terms, and while indexing these pages, Google has included the description meta in the result. I am pointing this out because the key to each of these pages being listed is an accurate page title and relevant content. So, the description tag doesn't appear to have as much influence on how these pages are getting listed; however, having a better description would make these listings more useful.
To change this behavior and add more meaningful data to my search results, after publishing this post, I am going to install the Add Meta Tags WordPress Plugin by G-Loaded. This plugin will give me more control over my meta description tag. Once Google re-indexes these pages, their search listings should start displaying the new descriptions thereby giving more meaningful search results.
Update (June 20, 2007)
It is now five days since I updated the description meta tag on my blog posts, and as I suspected that description data is now showing beneath the Google search results for each of the search terms I mention above.
Hi,
Thanks for the post. I'm making a band profile on MySpace and I would like Google to find it in the search results. Do you have any tips on how to get the MySpace profile "promoted"?