Meta title. How important is it?.

[axxe]

Hi there,

Recently I have read an interesting article about Meta tags, which explains why Google don’t read Meta tags anymore and why it is not important.

I must confess that all the information I found there is rather convincing, except one thing. I still believe that Meta title is some how important to Google, cause when you search something on google, firstly the results are displayed that have the most relevant Meta titles.

So what would be your opinion about it?

Cheers,
Donatas

[edited by: tedster at 8:11 am (utc) on Jan. 23, 2007]

[tedster]

The meta title (<meta name="title" content="Blah Blah Etc.">) is not the same HTML entity as the title element (<title>Blah Blah Etc.</title>). It is the title element thas has always had major sigificance for search engines, not the title meta tag.

[axxe]

Thanks for clarification. It is very much appreciated.

Cheers,
Donatas

[mcibor]

I use always use:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-2">
as it is required in using Polish letters.

I only sometimes use Author and Keywords. For now I also use a refresh, but only until I learn better AJAX, and that page isn't scanned, as it requires authentification. I wanted to use meta refresh to disable resending POST variables, but I didn't manage to do that - on meta refresh I still received all the , now unnecessary, information ( [webmasterworld.com...] ).

Description could be useful, but it's so easy to abuse this kind of information, that you would have to be very cautious to use it if you were a search engine.

I think that apart from the content-type it's not necessary to use the meta, especially if the rest of your page is well done, as the users are mostly oblivious to them.

The article was quite interesting, however the text:
"I know that there are a lot of so-called SEO opinions out there, but you can't afford to fool around with untested SEO methods, it's just not smart.
Read this article and get the reliable information on Meta Tags that you need."
is so self praising, that I feel a bit uncertain of its worth. Moreover "After reading this article, you'll see why it is critical to your success to stay on top of search engine trends and know how they affect you. " this article quite frankly says: don't use the meta, as it is omitted by most browsers and search engines, so you are not a bit smarter in that way.

But that's just my opinion.
Michal

Here you've got quite the same, but with more additional resources:
[searchenginewatch.com...]
Interesingly the page you provided doesn't show in first 20 results for:
search+engine+meta+tags [google.com] :)

[rocknbil]

Description could be useful....

Try putting the same description meta tag on every page of your site and see how well you (don't) index. :-)

The description meta tag, if present and unique, seems to be what appears as the site description in Google serps.

[g1smd]

Start here: [webmasterworld.com...]