Media Outreach

One question I am often asked is, “What are meta tags?”  The short answer is: meta tags are data that describes data.  That is to say more specifically, meta tags are one of the ways for a webmaster to describe and categorize their website in a way that makes it easy for search engines to return the best results for a given search query.

A little over a decade ago, meta tags were the number one way to classify a website with a particular set of terms.  However, the primary reliance of search engines on meta tags led to the practice of “keyword stuffing” – where unscrupulous people included as many keywords as possible in their meta tag listings to try and increase their visibility.  This practice was, for a time, highly effective.  The practice of including many terms, totally unrelated to the primary content of the website, search results were becoming increasing unreliable. This led to a fundamental shift in how meta tags are used today.

Today, the actual significance of meta tags, the “keywords” element in particular, is something of an unknown.  Keywords that rely on human input can suffer not only from misleading terms, but also minor errors such as typographical mistakes can render a keyword nearly irrelevant.  Most search engines have also come to recognize that many of the tags used also appear in the actual body of a site.  As such, many search engines rely more on factors like the number of times a unique word appears on a site, the number of links that refer to a site, the average number of visitors and page views, in addition to many other factors that are not as dependent on human-driven data.