Meta tag and its elements

I still have mixed feelings about Meta tags. As an old school webmaster, I think that Meta tags can help when you need to provide some structured information about a web page. In the good old times metadata helped search engines to categorize web pages correctly. But the situation changed in the beginning of our century when web consultants started to pro-actively manipulate Meta tags in order to achieve higher rankings on search engines.

Meta tag and its elements (also called attributes) are still supported by a very limited number of search engines. Yet, most major search engines, like Google, don’t use them for relevance anymore. Our advice is not to take Meta tags and their attributes too seriously as a way of improving your search engine rankings. This still does not mean that we should discard Meta elements completely, because they can still be important for the proper web page structure. As an example, we can point out at language attribute of the Meta tag that gains some importance if the web site uses specific language(s). Search engines may have become more sophisticated but they still consider this tag.

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