Meta tags have been an important part of SEO for many years. In fact, in the early days, meta tags like the keyword tag where of primary importance. In recent times, the title and description tags have become the most important with doubt raised over the need for a keyword tag now.

Search engines, and I am talking more about Google at present, are becoming much smarter. Google has been known to replace your description with text taken from the pages content. Google will only do this if it feels the description tag doesn’t offer the best description.

Recent news from Google is that they may be using the description tag less in the future. As users become more sophisticated and start using longer search queries, the descriptions need to move away from the generic one description fits all philosophy. By creating a description from your content Google can publish a search result that matches a search phrase more accurately.

There are two approaches to this – the first, the loss of the control over how your site appears in the search results; the second is to concede that a more appropriate description could lead to more clicks – that is, more visitors.

That will only leave the page title tag. I am sure that over time, if they are not already, the search engines will look for the first line of H1 defined text and use that as the page title.

The end result will be that meta tags will no longer be required as a part of a pages SEO program. There are many web sites, particularly those that have been created by the users, and I include blogs in this group, that have no meta tags at all. They will be the big winners as this technology changes. Is it for the good? Time will tell.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 3:24 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.