Most people have heard of Meta tags – they are a small piece of code you can put on each page of your website to let Google (and other search engines), know about the content on your page with aim of improving your Google Search rank.
Because some of these tags were widely abused in the past, and because Google now have a much smarter crawling engine, some of these meta tags are no longer needed – with one exception which I’ll get to below.
The two most common tags were ‘meta description’ and ‘meta keywords’ tags.
Although the meta description tag no longer affects your Google rank, it can still be used to ‘suggest’ the text that should be shown in a Google search result. The image below shows this text –
If you’ve got great content (which you should have!), then it’s not necessary to use the meta description tag at all, as Google is smart enough to pick out the best snippet of text to display in the search result list.
The other tag, meta keywords, is now completely unused so don’t waste your time with this one!
So are Meta tags harmful to your site?
No, not at all, but your time will be better spent on other areas of your site.