Is meta tag taken seriously by SE ?

[Hajoless]

Does google or any other search engine look for meta tag ?
If yes, do they matter if I don't have it for my site SERP or seo ?

Cheers

[Phoenyx]

They all do. They look at just about everything on the site. Your meta description is more or less the more important, as well as your page title.

[Abhishek Kundu]

hi,

in my experience i had found that Google seem not to give importance to

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">

.

it's used by Google to display it in the organic search results only.

yahoo & bing seem to like it.


kindest,
abhishek kundu

[wink0r]

it's used by Google to display it in the organic search results only.

That is a good reason to spend some time on it and make it enticing!

[royljestr]

Well, it MAY help a little bit, but not NEARLY as much as it used to!

[Phoenyx]

Anything that used to be completely relevant has lost some of its importance when it comes to the amount of times its abused. I always revert back to my training when I am not sure of things, and I know this; the bots use that information to create your description which you see in a Google search, which is what visitors see when they look at your link. As wink0r says, its a good idea to make it as enticing as you can, while still keeping it business and niche related. If the bots don't see that information, they take something from the page they're crawling, and it could be something you don't really want to rank with.

[Tri4ngle]

Anything that used to be completely relevant has lost some of its importance when it comes to the amount of times its abused. I always revert back to my training when I am not sure of things, and I know this; the bots use that information to create your description which you see in a Google search, which is what visitors see when they look at your link. As wink0r says, its a good idea to make it as enticing as you can, while still keeping it business and niche related. If the bots don't see that information, they take something from the page they're crawling, and it could be something you don't really want to rank with.

I will keep this in mind, certainly some things on some of the sites my boss asks me to promote shouldn't be the kind of text that the site ranks with. I guess meta info still matters.

[Phoenyx]

It does, in it's own small way.

[redchillimedia]

Meta description is picked up by search engines to display it in the SERPs results and user can find some idea about product and services. But meta keyword is totally neglected by search engines.

[Phoenyx]

Not totally neglected. Like I said, I still use them, and they have helped me. Even though its not as much as it would have previously.

[C.Rebecca]

Every search engine treats meta tags in a different way. Google does not consider meta keyword tags because webmasters have abused its usage.
Where as other major search engines like Yahoo! and Bing does count keyword meta tags while assigning SERP rankings.
All search engines respect other meta tags.

[madhusmita]

Yes, Meta tag is very important for the search engine.In this we are providing the information to the search engine. This is not visible to the noramal users.So, its effective for getting better indexing and also improving the PR of the site.

[Hogward]

No, I don't think Google still giving importance to Meta-Tags or Meta-Description. Perfect keyword and description is only important.

[rashid]

Google is giving importance to Meta description as it add those text to their search results . not giving any type of Meta Keywords as people are stuffing keywords in meta keywords & in the past people has misuse this tag . In current algo they are ignoring meta keywords .

[macgizmoguy]

MAKE THE MOST out of BOTH your Descriptiion and Keywords tags. The fundamental underlying concept is that these are ALL part of the 'vocabulary' of your web page and there are alot of bots beyond Google that incorporate EVERY word in your headers and body content to understand what your page is about. To leave your Keyword tag missing is dumb. To fail to craft a powerful, spot on Description is foolish. If you thing you can leave these out - or worse - let Google decide -- your site will suffer in rankings.

[candy]

not much important