I was compelled to publish this article after noticing several SEO specialists writing in reference to meta tags being dead or obsolite. Meta tags are not dead. I will be the first to say, meta tags are utilized by all major search engines and are very much in use and extremely important to search engine ranking. If you need proof of how important meta tags are, try removing your meta tags and watch what happens to your search engine positioning.

Your site will plummet to the depths of the unvisited web. Meta tags are frequently an overlooked factor which can improve the ranking of most any website. This is an example of how vital meta tags are to your webpage and to your search engine ranking. Our website ranks #6 and #7 consistantly on MSN for the keyword submit site. To test the dead meta tag theory, our source code editor changed one word in the meta description tag and we dropped to #15 in the search results. Our rankings on Google and several other search engines suffered even more so. Needless to say we made changes accordingly.

All major search engines definitely utilize meta tags for a description of the webpage and for indexing within the search results. The title tag is one of the most important on page factors to consider. This is because search engine spiders read this tag first and place a high level of importance on the keywords found there. The title tag is also used for the title of your listing in the search results.

The contents of your title tag will also appear in the top left corner of the browser bar. Correct title tag optimization is essential and will result in a dramatic increase in your search engine ranking. The title tag should contain at least one or more keywords to be of any relevance to the webpage.

Search engine spiders read the description meta tag next. This tag is often used as a website description in the search results. The description tag should also contain a few keywords. The keyword meta tag is also vital to search engine ranking giving search engine spiders a sample of relevant text and content within a webpage.

Meta Tags Composition & Upload: The way a page is coded is vital to the success you will get from search engines. There are three HTML Tags, which can affect your ranking; these are Title Tags, Keyword Tags and Description Tags.

Title Tags – HTML Title describes the contents of your web page. This title is most likely to appear in the results for search engines and on bookmarks, and should be made relevant to the contents on the web page.

Keyword Tags – Keyword frequency, weight, prominence and proximity are a few techniques that can help improve your search engine rankings. Most of these techniques have one thing in common – use of keywords. Keywords are words people type into a search engine… words that lead them to your site. Having the right keywords in your website’s source code in the form of a meta tag is the first step to better search engine positioning.

Description Tags – Description tags are HTML tags that describe in brief the contents of the page. These are visible to the surfer when your page appears in the results of a search. These can be effectively used to increase the frequency of keywords in the HTML of your web page.

Alt Tags Composition & Upload: ALT tags are basically image descriptions within a website. You can attach text to an image to describe it so that Search Engines can also find it. ALT descriptions help you rank higher in search engines. Search engine algorithms calculate the number of times keywords are repeated and give higher rank to pages that use them often. Keywords in the ALT descriptive text help you increase their frequency on the page. Search engines assume the terms are more relevant and important if they’re used in the page content.

Other meta tags include robots, resource, author, copyright etc. These tags are not as important as the title, description and keyword tag, however they should be included if possible. To acheive high search engine ranking optimize your meta data. Proper onpage optimization will greatly improve your search engine placement.