For years, Meta Tags were considered to be some sort of “magic bullet” when it came to search engine optimization. As time passed, though, they lost some of their allure. For awhile, spammers hammered the “meta keywords” tag with tons of irrelevant phrases that would make the page rank for all kinds of various terms. This caused some very bad SERPs, so the search companies, in their infinite reactive wisdom decided to pull the plug on the importance of meta keywords.
The description Meta Tag is King
The importance of the Meta Tag diminished with the passing of time, but some people still think it matters. If you do, feel free to add it to your pages, and use the keywords that most accurately describe the page. Don’t “stuff” anything in there. If it doesn’t fit, don’t bother.
An example of the use of the “meta keywords” tag:
An example of the use of the “meta description” tag:
The description meta tag is “very important”, especially in Google. You want to use the meta tag to give a very good clickable description of your website, because that’s what will show in the SERPs. Take the time to make sure that all of your meta description tags are unique, or you can end up with the dreaded duplicate content problem which may result in a Google time-based penalty, which prevents your website from ranking.